Genealogy

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Today’s kids (and many grown-ups) go wild for water parks – and no place has cashed in on the craze more than the Wisconsin Dells. It’s the self-proclaimed “Waterpark Capital of the World.” (For real. The Visitor & Convention Bureau actually registered the phrase with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2006. But the numbers might back up the claim. Between outdoor and indoor parks, the Dells boasts more than 200 waterslides, tube rides, racing slides, wave pools, lazy rivers, surfing machines, and other water amusements.

The magnificent forests and lakes in northern Wisconsin have been drawing Chicagoans for more than a century. With more than 1.75 million acres of protected forests dotted with some 3,000 lakes, it’s hard to believe that this area was virtually deforested by the logging industry in the 1800s and early 1900s.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was known as the “Newport of the West,” the place where the who’s who of Chicago’s Gilded Age came to escape the pollution and pace of the city. Flamboyant chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, his son, Cubs owner P. K. Wrigley, bicycle baron Ignatz Schwinn, washing machine maker F. L. Maytag, and many more wealthy industrialists had elaborate mansions on Lake Geneva’s shores.

For more than a century, Chicago vacationers have flocked to Door County, Wisconsin. Its popularity exploded in the nineteenth century after a canal was cut across the Door County peninsula, creating a quicker and less hazardous route for large steamboats to reach Green Bay from Lake Michigan.

One of the last surviving commercial fishing villages in Michigan is in Leland in the neighborhood known simply as Fishtown. But while commercial and charter boats continue to dock and unload their chubs and whitefish, their hauls aren’t anything like they used to be. Today, most of the old, weathered shanties once used for net mending, ice, and storage are owned and maintained by a nonprofit preservation group.

South Haven is for blueberry lovers. For one weekend every August, the humble fruit takes center stage as blueberry farmers and their fans descend upon the town, located in the epicenter of the state’s blueberry industry, for a four-day festival – including a parade, concerts, and, of course, at least one pie-eating contest – all in honor of that humble fruit.

The Sister Lakes region is twenty miles inland of Lake Michigan, but home to eleven lakes in a six-mile radius, creating a bounty of local lakefront property and ample access to boating and water sports, as well as swimming and fishing.

The quirkiest attraction in Saugatuck is what locals claim is the last surviving chain ferry in America. There’s no steering mechanism; the operator cranks the hand-powered vessel along a chain on the bottom of the Kalamazoo River. If you’re itching to get on a boat, at one dollar per person each way (plus tip), it is probably the best deal you’ll find anywhere.

If you’re traveling by car to Mackinac Island in Northern Michigan, know that Google Maps won’t be of much use. The app will tell you it “cannot calculate driving directions.” That’s because this car-free island can be reached only by boat or by plane – or, in the winter, by traversing the ice on a snowmobile.

Parts of Holland, Michigan feel like another place and time, and for good reason: the town was founded by Dutch immigrants in 1847, and it is still firmly rooted in its heritage.

Just north of the Indiana state line in Michigan lies a string of eight, charming, little, lakeside towns just far enough away from Chicago for weekend getaways: Michiana, Grand Beach, New Buffalo, Union Pier, Lakeside, Harbert, Sawyer, and, slightly inland, Three Oaks.