June 13, 2026: The Grand Hotel

We boarded Shepler’s Ferry and traversed the Strait of Mackinac to Mackinac Island, the Jewel of the Great Lakes.

This was what we saw when we disembarked.

These insects were waiting for us, too … millions of them. I thought that they were mosquitoes, but they are midges. Fortunately, they don’t bite.

Built in 1887, the Grand Hotel was finished in 93 days. The builders worked in three shifts. They started on both ends, but it didn’t quite meet in the middle so the floor remains uneven to this day.

The Grand Hotel itself is a destination. No two of the 397 guest rooms are alike.

Each guest room has been tastefully decorated by New York Designer Carleton Varney, in its own unusual character and style, complete with amenities.

The Greenbrier in West Virginia was decorated by legendary interior designer Dorothy Draper, and Carleton Varney was her famous protégé and the longtime owner and president of her firm. Together, they created the vibrant, highly recognizable “Draper look”.

The Grand Hotel has been visited by U.S. presidents, world-renowned entertainers and countless families for well
over a century.

The chandelier in the cupola at the top of the hotel

The Grand Hotel’s front porch is the longest in the world at about 660 feet in length and has been dubbed America’s Front Porch.

To experience the bygone era of hospitality, we dressed for dinner in the Grand Hotel’s historic Salle á Manger dining room featuring an exquisite five-course meal!

It was too cold to swim in the Esther Williams Swimming Pool.

Fudge from Mackinaw Island is very famous. There are 13 fudge stores on the island.

The 1909 bronze sculpture of Marquette erected in Marquette Park is famous because no historical record of Marquette’s true physical appearance exists. The sculptor used his own face as the model for the priest’s head.

A fateful event took place in the American Fur Company’s retail store, located on Mackinac Island, on June 6, 1822. The accidental shot that was thought to have fatally wounded Alexis St. Martin there brought together an inquisitive doctor and a unique patient and made medical history.

St. Martin was the test subject for Dr. William Beaumont, Fort Mackinac’s doctor at the time. When the wound healed in a unique way, forming a fistula that bonded the torso wall to the stomach, Beaumont started a series of experiments on human digestion. The living, working stomach was accessible to the doctor, and he proceeded to test how food digested through observations, lowering foods into the stomach, and testing the gastric juices in vials outside of the stomach. Almost 250 experiments were conducted and Beaumont concluded that digestion in the stomach was a chemical process using gastric juice. He discovered enzymes.

John Jacob Astor established his American Fur Company headquarters on Mackinac Island in 1822, monopolizing the regional fur trade and helping to build his fortune as America’s first millionaire. Ironically, despite the island’s central role in his empire, Astor himself never actually visited it. (John D. Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire in 1916 making his fortune in the oil business via the Standard Oil Company.)

No cars are allowed on Mackinac Island so transportation is by bike or horse drawn carriages. The carriages are available year-round 24 hours, every day. Mail is not delivered. One must make a trip to the post office.

There are 400 Belgian Draft and Percheron Horses. Many of these work horses come from the Amish communities. They work a four-to-six hour shift and then are “off” for 24 hours. That clip clop should be on a sound machine because I had a hard time staying awake when we took our carriage tour of the island.