Great Lakes Getaway: Harbor Springs, Michigan

"See, this has to be the same cottage," my mom says to me, a sleuth's excitement in her voice. She's clutching a handful of 80-year-old photographs in one hand and counting the back-porch steps of this Lake Michigan cottage with the other. "Five steps in this picture, five right here. Lattice under the porch–same," she continues. The most compelling evidence yet. I look around the property for residents. We're trespassing.

But in a nice, curious way. I've brought my mom, Beverly, to Harbor Springs, Michigan, to explore the lakefront town and quiet retreat where her mother, aka Mimi, spent summers as a child in the twenties and thirties. Mimi passed away a few years ago, and Mom had never seen the childhood house (long since sold) depicted in so many of Mimi's stories and photos.

So we made the pilgrimage in September, after the summer crowds have returned to Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland and the wind picks up on the lake and the airy hardwood forests begin to shake into colorful fall. While Mimi used to drive up from Atlanta in an air-conditionless Buick, we flew into Grand Rapids and drove (ate) our way through apple harvest season in northern Michigan. With only a few pictures of little Mimi in the yard and the cottage community's name, Idylwilde, we've come to enjoy the northwest corner of Michigan. There's also hope we'll gain a brief sense of place that can fill the kind of familial gap Mom had begun to notice.

Thanks to some small-town help from a local developer who knew the Idylwilde homes, we've wandered onto the property of this two-story clapboard cottage. Satisfied with our discovery, we take the narrow path from the backyard to the beach. The lake, the big one that reflects a dozen shades of blue and crashes and disappears into fog like an ocean, spreads out before us.

It's no wonder Mimi and so many others returned to this place year after year. There's drama in the wide-open water, towering bluffs, quiet forests, and a road, the Tunnel of Trees, that snakes through the scene like in a German car ad. The towns run the gamut from one-horse general store (Good Hart) to Nantucket-like elegance (Harbor Springs) to kitsch-free Midwest charm (Petoskey). Mom peruses the shops in Harbor Springs while I wander among grand old homes sitting on pristine lawns and overlooking a calm bay dotted with swaying, anchored sailboats. We head to Petoskey and cruise the hilly streets and eclectic retail, settling on Grain Train for lunch.

A great way to walk off lunch hides at the lakeside park in Petoskey. Besides faded photos, Mom brought another relic, a marble-smooth gray rock covered with spheres of tightly spoked patterns. Petoskey Stones are a geologic oddity found in large numbers along this shoreline. Mimi kept one in her dresser all her life. Mom showed me the pattern so we could search for our own.

Like most things worth finding, Petoskey Stones don't jump out at you. It takes a trained eye to notice the subtle pattern that becomes pronounced only when polished. I comb the shifting pebbles at my feet until my eyes hurt. Mom does the same. Petoskey life drifts by in cars, on bikes, on foot. Clouds' shadows float across the gigantic lake. Boats putter out of the harbor. Mom and I search and kneel and rinse and toss back, oblivious to it all. In the end we find a few keepers. They go in her purse and in my pocket for our own dressers.

At sunset, we drive down the Tunnel of Trees and stop for a pumpkin stroll through organic Pond Hill Farm. It's easy to imagine generations of visitors doing the same thing, escaping to this North Woods hamlet, at the edge of water and trees and just before the end of the road.