Three nights on a small spring-fed lake in Clare County, with one afternoon drive north to Cadillac's two-lake waterfront.
Windover Lake is fifty acres. Spring-fed, about sixty-eight feet down where it drops off, still enough on a warm morning to fish before the wind finds the water. One house anchors the long weekend: one of our Michigan cottage rentals, Windover Lake Retreat, on that shoreline in the village of Lake, in Clare County. Three nights, built for a family that wants a dock more than a schedule. Two days you barely leave the water. The third, you drive north and earn it back — here’s how they go.
Friday: get in, get supplied
Come in the afternoon and don’t plan past the dock. The village of Lake is small — a general store, a bar, a rail-trail crossing, and not much past that. Your one errand is Lake General Store on School Street, about four miles and nine minutes from the house. It carries groceries and beer and wine, and it cuts its own meat. Load up for two slow breakfasts and a grill night, because the nearest real grocery run is a lot farther than the store down the road.
Dinner the first night is close. Lakeside Bar & Grille, in the village, opens for lunch and dinner — a plain bar and grill, burgers and a Friday crowd. Same four miles back to the water. Then the dock, and whatever light is left.
Saturday: the lake, then Cadillac
Take the morning on the water. Windover holds largemouth bass, bluegill, and northern pike, and fifty acres is small enough to paddle the whole shoreline and back before lunch. The smell is weed and cold water. The boards on the dock go warm by nine. Cold coffee, a rising bass, nobody in a hurry — this is the part of the weekend the house is actually for. Bluegill are the easy fish here, and the easy fish are the point when there’s a kid on the dock with a bobber. Let them catch a bucket of them. Throw them all back.
Then drive north. Cadillac is about fifty miles up US-131 and M-55, an hour and a quarter each way — not a quick hop, which is the reason you do it once and make an afternoon of it. What’s up there is more water, and bigger. The town sits pinched between two lakes, Lake Cadillac and Lake Mitchell, joined by the third-of-a-mile Clam Lake Canal. The canal was dug in 1873 at the direction of city father George A. Mitchell, to float felled timber from Lake Mitchell to the mills on Lake Cadillac. Log drives are long gone. The channel stayed.
William Mitchell State Park runs the 660-acre strip between the two lakes, and the canal is the thing to walk. People shore-fish it for perch, walleye, pike, and panfish. If the afternoon runs hot and the kids are done with the water, the Carl T. Johnson Hunting and Fishing Center sits right there in the park — a DNR visitor center with mounted wildlife and a fish tank of Michigan natives, open daily 10 to 5 from Memorial Day through Labor Day, weekends after that. An hour, air-conditioned, free to walk through.
Eat downtown before you point the car back south. Clam Lake Beer Co. is at 106 South Mitchell Street — a brewpub in a big rehabbed room that pours its own beer and runs a full kitchen, open to 10 most nights and 11 on Friday and Saturday. It’s fifty miles home in the dark. Eat first.
Sunday: the trail, then home
The Pere Marquette State Trail runs straight through the village — fifty-five miles of old rail bed across Clare, Lake, and Osceola counties, crushed limestone, flat the whole way. The Lake trailhead is about four miles from the house. Walk it, or ride an hour out and an hour back, before you have to think about checkout. Then load the car with sand still in it.
The drives are the whole plan, so know them going in. Everything in the village of Lake, the store and the bar and the trailhead, is about four miles from the house, nine minutes each way. Cadillac is the one long leg, roughly fifty miles and an hour and a quarter up US-131. Do the Cadillac day when you’ve got a full afternoon and evening, not a morning you want to keep.
Michigan waterfront rentals, Windover Lake Retreat, books best in the warm months, when the lake is swimmable, the trail is dry, and a drive to Cadillac is worth giving up half a day. For the rest of the town — the store, the bar, what the trail is like once the color turns — the Lake guide has it.
The lake is still there Monday. You won’t be.