Michigan grows three-quarters of the nation’s tart cherries, the majority within an hour of downtown Traverse City. Most people come for the cherries, the water, and the wineries.

Grand Traverse Bay splits into two arms below town, with the Old Mission Peninsula running up between them. The water is cold and clear. Downtown sits at the foot of the bay, walkable end to end, with a public beach a few blocks off the main street.

Half an hour west is Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the largest freshwater dune system in the world, with bluffs rising up to 450 feet above Lake Michigan. The drive out follows M-22 along the Leelanau shore through Suttons Bay, Leland, and Glen Arbor.

There are more than forty wineries on the two peninsulas. Both sit on the 45th parallel, and the bay moderates the winters enough for cool-climate grapes to survive them. Riesling is what the region does best.

The cherries came first. Growers started the festival in 1925 as the Blessing of the Blossoms to promote the crop, and it now draws half a million people. The orchards it was built around are still producing in the same places.

Interlochen

Fifteen miles southwest of town, in a stand of pines between two lakes, there is a 1,200-acre campus that most visitors to Traverse City never see.

Joseph Maddy opened the National High School Orchestra Camp there in the summer of 1928. By 1930, the Sunday evening concerts were being broadcast on CBS and NBC. In 1962, Interlochen Arts Academy opened on the same grounds, the first arts boarding high school in the country. Roughly one in ten musicians in America’s top orchestras studied there. The alumni list runs from Jessye Norman and Josh Groban to Mike Wallace, and includes Google co-founder Larry Page, who spent two summers there on saxophone and has credited his music training for his impatience with slow computing.

Camp fills the grounds each summer with roughly 3,000 students from every state and more than 40 countries. They audition to get in, and they wear the uniform the camp adopted in 1928, blue corduroy and light blue shirts. You hear practice coming out of the rehearsal halls most of the day.

Established performers come through too. Renée Fleming sang with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra this summer.

Interlochen runs performances year-round, and many of them are free. The schedule includes afternoon student recitals, open rehearsals, faculty concerts, readings, and exhibitions. Ticketed student performances start around ten dollars.

Since 1928, the camp season has closed on the final Sunday of summer with Liszt’s Les Préludes, played by the combined student orchestras and wind symphony with the dance ensemble. It has happened every year but two. Admission is free, and people line up hours ahead.

A darker history

Interlochen was in the national news last month. A lodge on campus had carried Jeffrey Epstein’s name until 2008. He came to camp as a fourteen-year-old bassoonist in 1967 and was a donor from 1990 to 2003. The school took his name off the building after his first conviction and demolished it, a month before publishing an independent investigation into decades of sexual abuse and misconduct at the camp and school.

Two places to walk into

Cherry Republic sits at 154 East Front Street. Bob Sutherland started the company in Glen Arbor in 1989, selling T-shirts out of his car trunk with the motto “Life, Liberty, Beaches and Pie.” The store carries more than 200 cherry products and sets out an almost overwhelming variety of sample bowls of dried cherries, chocolate-covered cherries, sour candy cherries, and salsas. There is a wine tasting room in the back. The Glen Arbor flagship is worth the stop if you are driving to the dunes.

Grand Traverse Pie Company opened on West Front Street in 1996 and turns 30 this summer. Mike and Denise Busley learned to bake from a pie maker in Julian, California, and came home to do it here. Their Cherry Crumb is the signature pie of the Cherry Festival. There is a pie happy hour on weekday afternoons, a slice and a coffee for very little. Buy a whole one before you leave.

When to go

Late August into September is the best stretch here. The bay is usually warmest in September, the crowds have thinned, and harvest runs through the wineries at the same time.

Color peaks between October 5 and 20 in most years.

July is the festival month. Book early and expect company.