Tour Groups

Each route each day will have 20–25 cars in rotating tours. The Red Group begins with Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park. The White Group commences with the Mackinac Island trip. The Green Group heads to Charlevoix and the Old Mission Peninsula. Everyone will drive and see everything, but on different days.

There will be your choice of a traditional printed map or a Rallista route app to guide you.

Old Mission Peninsula Tour

This tour begins with driving south to Charlevoix for lunch, where you can watch the Beaver Island ferry and sailboats pass by. At the main street is the drawbridge over the channel where Lake Charlevoix joins Lake Michigan. It seems to go up and down about every thirty minutes.

Immediately after lunch, we’ll circle around the Mushroom Houses of Charlevoix. They were constructed by Earl Young, one boulder at a time between 1919 and the 1950s. He located and stored each stone, waiting, sometimes for years, for the exact spot where it was always meant to be, then setting each cedar shake across the roof in a flowing composition.

After Charlevoix, we will drive to Traverse City and its shoreline, filled with tourist hotels to a right turn up a narrow finger of land dividing the east and west bays. This is the Old Mission Peninsula, filled with orchards and vineyards. It’s microclimate allows for everything from apricots and peaches to vineyards to grow up here at the 45th parallel. There will be stops at the Mari (Italian) and Chateau Chantal (French vines) wineries. There is a fee for tastings (we were told it was because college students had made free wine samples a cruise event, stopping at a dozen or more wineries on the peninsula).

We will also drive to land’s end at the lighthouse. The peninsula is so narrow that it is possible to view both east and west bays from spots along its central ridge. We’ll drive down the central road one way, along a shoreline the other way.

The tour winds up with dinner at the big log cabin of Harrington’s by the Bay in Traverse City before heading back to your hotel.

There will be an option to stay in Charlevoix and explore more of downtown for anyone preferring not to drive at dusk or after sunset. It will likely be dark by the time we arrive back in Petoskey.