A Michigan journal, gone quiet, coming back.
The Great Lakes Gleaner started as a small Grand Rapids project to catalog the drives, docks, and dunes worth the detour. The lights went out for a while. We're turning them back on.
Greatlakesgleaner.com goes live
The first guides landed within days of each other: the Kalamazoo Nature Center, Yankee Springs, Frederik Meijer Gardens, then Holland's Dutch heritage and Petoskey. A Michigan travel journal, run out of Grand Rapids.
A full year of guides
Through the spring, summer, and fall, the archive grew to dozens of destinations — the U.P.'s mining towns and Kitch-iti-kipi, Mackinac Island, the Leelanau Peninsula, the Porcupine Mountains, Lake Huron's beach towns, and eventually a "definitive ranking" of Michigan's ski resorts that December.
The posts slow down
New travel guides became rarer. Hosting lapsed sometime after, and greatlakesgleaner.com quietly went offline — the live site and even its Wayback Machine snapshots became unreachable.
Rebuilt from the original archive
A saved WordPress export of the original site turned up in a backup folder, along with the logo and a few photos. Every one of the 27 surviving travel guides has been cleaned up and relaunched here — new domain on the way, same shoreline-first mission, with a few interactive tools (hi, trip planner) joining for the first time.
The rules we're keeping
Boots-on-the-ground first
No guide gets published without a real answer to "where do you actually park."
Small towns over chains
We'd rather send you to a diner in Manistique than a chain off the highway.
Michigan, all of it
The U.P. gets equal billing with the mitten. So does the stuff an hour from Grand Rapids.