Mackinaw to Saginaw: Tracing 2017 Route in Reverse

The bathroom is in the building by the water. The entrance to it faces the water. I was here at Presque Isle only once 5 years ago, and yet I remembered. The memory buried deep in the brain came gushing back as I approached the harbor on Grand Lake Road, and I started looking for the tackle shop and deli on the left of the road and the marina to the right. It was as if I was here just yesterday.

I was going take the freeway and go down the middle of the Lower Peninsula toward Lansing. Back in 2017, we drove up US-23 from Saginaw to Mackinaw, and I'd rather take the road not taken before. A few minutes into it, I changed my mind. Sweeping down the coastal for the second time, or anything for that matter, would be better than the boring inland freeway. I exited I-75 soon after I left Mackinaw and headed to Cheboygan. From there, I followed US-23 all the way to Bay City where the Tesla station was located.

As soon as I got to Cheboygan, I looked for the campground that we stayed overnight in 2017, but I couldn't find it. It turned out Robert's Landing Campground was halfway between Cheboygan and Mackinaw City. I missed it because I took detour through I-75. 

Huron Beach, Preque Isle, Tawas City. From Cheboygan, it was a walk down the memory lane. The road never looks the same in the opposite direction, but I managed to find most of the locations that we stopped in 2017. Some places changed. Boneyard BBQ, and its dancing pig sign, at Tawas City was gone and was replaced by another eatery. I stopped at Tawas State Park that we skipped in 2017 because the car didn't have enough range. And I'm glad I did. It was a vast sand bar stretching out into the lake encircling Tawas Bay. It was larger version of Sand Point Beach in Pictured Rock National Lakeshore.

I must have stopped at Bay City supercharger 2017: it was the last supercharger in the Lower Peninsula and the next one was in Luddington on the other side of the peninsula several hundred miles away. But I didn't remember the Telsa station there. The similar look of the charging stations must've turned my brain off; it's the wonderous new places that you remember, and Tesla stations isn't one of them. From there, I continued on US-23 to Toledo skirting Flint and Ann Arbor and bedded down at Red Roof Inn after recharging the car in Maumee.