The Official Website of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Visitors Bureau

good five hours drive and a million miles or so from the Motor City lies another Michigan, one that time happily forgot - a peninsula of small hamlets (and one bona fide town) that ends in the hushed splendor of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The Leelanau Peninsula, which juts out into the hypnotic inland seas known as Lake Michigan is a paradise of outdoor activities - swimming, hiking, fishing and canoeing - give it a 9 on our Activities scale. But it is the dunes at Sleeping Bear, which range in color from pale champagne to burnt sienna and which roll and spike to 400 feet in height that earned a perfect 10 in our Splendor category. Here, you can picnic as if you were the last family on earth - and actually feel that way even at the most crowded time of year.

- Smart Money