Mackinac Island

The ferry engine cuts and you hear it immediately — horse hooves on pavement, bicycle bells, the creak of carriage springs. Mackinac Island banned motor vehicles in 1898, and the absence of engines registers physically before you've stepped off the dock. The air smells of horse leather and fudge, and the pace drops to something the nineteenth century would recognise.

Mackinac Island sits in the strait where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet, a three-and-a-half-square-mile island that has operated without automobiles for over a century. The Grand Hotel's porch — 660 feet long and the longest in the world — overlooks the strait with the kind of unhurried grandeur that modern resorts attempt and never quite achieve. Fudge has been made in the same shop windows on Main Street by the same families since the 1880s; the sweet, warm smell is a deliberate part of the arrival experience. Fort Mackinac, built by the British in 1780 and handed to the Americans in 1796, runs daily historical re-enactments within the original limestone fortifications. The island's interior is eighty percent state park, accessible by bicycle or horse-drawn carriage on roads that wind through birch and cedar forest.