Trips That Keep You Closer to the,
Water in the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes, Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, hold twenty percent of the world’s surface freshwater and together form the most significant freshwater system on earth. Michigan makes the strongest case for lingering: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore rises above Lake Michigan’s water in towering sand formations, while Torch Lake inland ranks consistently among the most beautiful lakes in the country. Lake Superior’s southern shore at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore presents sandstone cliffs in ochre and rust dropping directly into the coldest of the five lakes, drawing serious outdoor travelers from across the country. Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula, with ten state parks along forty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, and Ohio’s Lake Erie islands off Sandusky round out a Great Lakes circuit that most families only begin to cover in a single trip.

The Midwest interior rewards the traveler who thinks in lakes rather than landmarks. Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, bordering Ontario in the north, is one of the few places in the lower forty-eight where you can paddle for days without crossing your own path, while the Brainerd lakes region around Gull Lake and Mille Lacs offers the kind of unhurried cabin summer that grandparents recognize and grandchildren carry with them. Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks spans more than 1,100 miles of shoreline, the longest of any man-made lake in the United States, with Table Rock Lake near Branson offering a quieter, cleaner alternative in the limestone bluffs of the White River valley. South Dakota’s Sylvan Lake, set inside Custer State Park among granite spires and ponderosa pine, and Illinois’ Starved Rock State Park, where eighteen glacial canyons drop into cedar-lined gorges along the Illinois River, fill out a Midwest road trip that has no obvious reason to end.