Garden Peninsula, MichiganThe drive: 6 hours

The Garden Peninsula, which I discovered on a drive around the Great Lakes nearly 20 years ago, is out of the way even for the Upper Peninsula. Hanging off the bottom of the mother peninsula, it is a 22-mile-long knuckle of land reaching from Michigan toward Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. 

Near the far end, at the mouth of Big Bay de Noc, I found a ghost town. The gray wooden buildings of Fayette, their last chips of paint scoured away by 150 winters, told the story of the entire U.P. in just a few blocks. The town was built around a deep aquamarine cove shortly after the Civil War. A tall limestone cliff blocked the winds off Lake Michigan, making Fayette a placid haven for schooners. And it was perfect for smelting pig iron: The mines were nearby, the thick forests fueled the furnaces, and the limestone purified the ore. 

Fayette, which shipped out 229,288 tons of iron during its 24-year life, is now a state park. In its last-ditch incarnation, it has been transformed into a historic village, with a restored blacksmith shop, a kiln, a boarding house, and a livery stable. The townsite is open from May to October, with guided tours during the summer. 

As I drove back toward U.S. 2, the highway that runs from St. Ignace, in Mackinac County, all the way to Washington State’s Puget Sound, I passed a low-roofed brick schoolhouse advertising “Used Books.” This was hardly out of place: Long winters make avid readers. “I’ve got 10,000 books in here,” said the owner, John Thill, the grandson of a plasterer from Luxembourg who came across in 1870 to work in the Fayette Hotel. “I’ve got another 30,000 I haven’t even looked at.”

The Garden Peninsula is the only corner of the U.P. that grows crops, hence the name. Thill pointed to an orchard across the road. Those were his apple trees — 5,000 of them. Thill has since closed his bookstore, but the orchard is still there.

“It’s really an extension of Door County,” he said of the Garden Peninsula. But it’s one the tourists haven’t discovered. It’s a place to camp and hike, not brunch and watch fish boils. There’s hardly any commerce at all: The village of Garden, with a population of 187, has a jam shop and an artisans’ studio. Let the tourists have Door County — the Garden Peninsula is where you can truly escape from it all.