Top 10 Memories from Felicia and Erik’s Wedding Trip to Mackinac Island

This week, our friends Felicia and Erik will be celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary with a return trip to Mackinac Island, the scene of their multi-day, epic wedding celebration that my wife Teresa and I were fortunate enough to be part of back in 2010.

A lot has changed in 10 years’ time. Kids have grown up, there are beloved members of our group who we have unfortunately lost, and that steady diet of vacation fudge and IPA is certainly going to wear a little differently on us now than it did a decade ago. And in this post-COVID world, none of us are exactly sure what to expect. This trip is definitely going to feel strange with the face coverings, social distancing and other safety precautions. But like our timeless island host, some things will never change. Good times, great friends and the best of memories.

So, I am sharing with you my Top 10 list of memories from that first trip back in 2010.

Note: I realize that there are two dozen or so people that this content will really resonate with – for obvious reasons – because they were there to experience some of these memories when they happened, or in a few cases, supplied the punchlines to some of the jokes. However, you don’t need to have been there and don’t necessarily even need to know who any of these people are to appreciate this Top 10 list. It’s really for anyone who’s ever been (or is thinking about going) to the island and would like some suggestions for how to make that next trip to Mackinac even more memorable!

#10 Rendezvousing With Everyone in St. Ignace At The Driftwood Before Taking the Ferry Over to the Island

After attending a picture-perfect backyard ceremony at Felicia and Erik’s home in Haslett, our group temporarily disbanded before making our respective four hour drives north to reconvene at the Driftwood – a local restaurant and bar on North State Street in St. Ignace. Now, this was cool for multiple reasons. First, we got to drive over the Mackinac Bridge, which honestly never gets old. Second, the Driftwood is owned by an old friend of mine, a guy named Tom Sposito. Whenever we’re in the area, we like to frequent his establishment in the hopes that he’ll be there that day and we can steal a few minutes of his time to get caught up, reminisce and share a few laughs. Finally, this particular trip to the Driftwood was memorable, because after leaving from the nearby docks and enjoying our short ferry ride over to the island, our group was reunited with Felicia, Erik and the boys who met us for drinks out behind the Chippewa Hotel after Dr. Schultz – who owns the veterinary clinic where Felicia works – had flown them over to the island on his private plane. (Can you say style points?)

#9 My and Felicia’s Brother Danny’s Brilliant Plan to Scam the Fudge Shops

I can’t say more without incriminating myself, other than to simply say that our attempt to score some free fudge didn’t work. But since I’m still a little fuzzy on criminal confection law and whether intent constitutes an actual crime, I just think that some things are better left unsaid, and maybe more importantly, un-prosecuted. Just in case though…It was all Danny’s idea! He coerced me into doing it!

#8 Riding the Tandem with Felicia’s Cousin, Dave

After two full days of incessantly bugging Felicia’s cousin Dave to go for a ride with me on our tandem bike, it wasn’t so much the fact that he finally capitulated that gave me so much joy. It was the eloquent manner in which he chose to communicate his true intentions to me. I assumed he meant, “You’ll look sweet, upon the seat, of a bicycle built for two,” and simply must have been paraphrasing the line from the classic Harry Dacre song when he opted for the much more direct, and slightly less poetic, “Let’s go, douchebag.” (It wasn’t quite “You had me at hello,” but I got the gist of what he was saying).

#7 Exploring the Interior of the Island

Seems like an obvious thing to point out, but staying more than one day on the island just means that you have that much more time to check out all of those sights you can’t possibly cram into your typical day trip. When we were there back in 2010, my wife Teresa and I would spend our days biking around to check out some of the lesser-known attractions located deep within the interior of the island. It was during one of these spontaneous expeditions that we first came across Sugar Loaf, the 75-foot-tall rock formation that is the largest post-glacial erosion feature in the Straits of Mackinac. On another trip, we biked all the way up to the highest point on the island where the ruins of Fort Holmes are located – which we were told is the best vantage point on the island to stargaze from. Although, full disclosure, we’ve never been brave enough to attempt the trip up there after dark, partly because of how difficult, and potentially dangerous it would be to traverse the long, winding road that snakes its way up through the dense sections of forest, and it might also have just a teensy-weensy bit to do with the setting’s natural spook factor.

#6 Randomly Meeting Up with People from our Group and Engaging in Spontaneous Day-Drinking at Different Pubs

With a group as big as ours, chances were that you would eventually run into someone you know. And, because Mackinac Island has the highest per capita total of drinking establishments per square mile than practically every other place on the planet, there was a very high probability that your fortuitous encounter would be conveniently located within stumbling distance of a nearby watering hole.

#5 When Felicia’s Nephew Luke was Walking Around Main Street Wearing a Fake Mustache and Puffing on one of those Novelty Cigars that Make the Realistic-Looking Smoke

I think Luke must have only been 8 or 9 at the time, so needless to say he got a number of confused looks from tourists walking by. To Luke’s credit, he never broke character, leaving passersby to wonder whether they had just witnessed the youngest kid on record to have hit puberty, or one of the weirdest, tiniest middle-aged men that they’ll probably ever see.

#4 Walking Back from the Wedding Reception Dinner at the Woods and Running into the Lamp Post

Okay, this one requires a little bit of set-up. One night, Felicia and Erik had arranged for a big group dinner at the Woods, the restaurant owned by the Grand Hotel that is located way up in the middle of the island. As the evening wore on and good drink mixed with good conversation, many of us lost track of time. Before long, someone came over and informed the 10 or 12 of the remaining members of our group that the last horse-drawn taxi headed back to town would be leaving shortly. On a whim, we collectively decided that we were having too good of a time, that we couldn’t leave quite yet, and that we’d just walk back to town when we were good and ready. An hour or so later, after making a brief pitstop at the bar to purchase the most expensive roadie ever – an $80 bottle of wine – we set off down the darkened road toward main street. For the most part, our slow descent from the interior of the island was uneventful. But as we passed by the Grand Hotel, the street started to widen, and large wrought-iron, ornamental lamp posts started appearing at either end of intermittent oblong-shaped traffic islands, neatly landscaped sections of the median which served to now separate two distinct lanes of traffic. In the process of swerving in and out of these traffic islands, Erik, who apparently had seeing-eye duty at the time since he was the person walking closest to me, must have lost track of where we were because he was walking right next to me when I stepped right over the short cement curb bordering the traffic island and smacked my face right into the side of the wrought iron lamp post. I’m not sure who was more startled: Me, Erik or the lamp post.

#3 Leaving Horn’s and Trying to Get Back to our Hotel by Myself

The group at Horn’s Gaslight Bar. Danny, Chris and Erik sitting at the bar, and Doyle and Shar are dancing beside them.

When we finally got back to town that night, we continued straight down Main Street to meet up with the rest of our group. They had been waiting for us at Horn’s. After one or two beers (on top of all the other beers I drank, which were now mixing in my tummy with some wine that had been shaken, not stirred by a wrought-iron lamp post induced concussion) I felt like I might possibly get sick. I walked out onto the middle of the busy dance floor where Teresa was dancing with Dave’s wife Brenda, and told Teresa, “I need to leave or I’m going to get sick”. She momentarily paused and looked at me with this expressionless stare which I initially mistook as comprehension, but then she immediately went back to dancing so I realized that my S.O.S. hadn’t registered with her. No, I was on my own.

I beelined it for the front door, and as discreetly as possible, I escaped out onto the quiet street. Now, at this point I knew that our hotel, the Main Street Inn, was just a little ways down on the same side of the street. I also knew that the entrance to the hotel was down at the end of one of those long corridors that run beneath the buildings. I knew that there was a giant ceramic turtle located at the end of this particular corridor. Simple. I would start checking corridors and when I found the one with the giant turtle then I would know I was in the right place (Yes, now that I’m saying it, I do realize that this sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person. But I digress...) I’m not sure how many corridors I ended up checking, or how long it took me to finally get to the right place. All that I can tell you is that I was so excited when I found the giant turtle that I bolted through the door of our hotel and strolled by the night shift crew on my way to the elevator waving my magnetic key card around in the air like I was showing them my credentials, with the bravado and confidence of a CSI Detective showing up to lock down a newly taped off crime scene. “I got it guys, nothing to see here. Official drunk business.”

I took the elevator to the third floor. I knew that ours was the first door to the right of the elevator. Again, pretty straightforward. I just needed to locate the first door to the right of the elevator and try my key card to gain entry to our room. I inserted the magnetic key card into the horizontal slot, waited a few seconds then started jiggling the door handle like I was playing the Safe Cracker game on the Price Is Right. Nothing. I turned the key card around a complete 180 degrees and tried again. Still nothing. I flipped the card upside down, and after two more attempts, trying every possible orientation of the magnetic strip in the door, I still came up empty. I took a step back to collect my thoughts There must have been something that I missed. That’s when I noticed the other door, next to the one that I had been violently shaking for the last ten minutes. I slid the key card into the slot of this door, the correct door, and the lock beeped and I was in. I stumbled over and promptly passed out on one of the nearby beds. But that’s not where the story ends. A little while later, Teresa had her fill of techno beats and was finally ready to call it a night. She made the short walk back to our hotel, and I’m assuming that hers was a far less eventful journey than my game of hide-and-seek with the giant ceramic turtle. Since I had taken off with our only room key, when she got to our room she knocked on the door for me to let her in. I didn’t answer, so she knocked again. Still nothing. Eventually she went to the front desk, and asked one of the night shift crew to call up to our room, explaining, “My husband must have fallen asleep because he’s not answering the knock on our door,” to which the hotel worker asked, “Are you sure he is in the room?” which is the very first time Teresa stopped to consider the possibility that maybe something awful could have happened to her drunk, blind husband who had wandered off to go walking around an expansive island surrounded by water. When the call up to our room went unanswered, the night clerk gave Teresa a new key card, and she rushed back upstairs. With a welling sense of panic, she flung open the door of our room just as I sat up in bed and shot her a nonchalant “Hey.”

As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well.

#2 Taking the Tandem Around the Island at 1:30 a.m.

On another, much more chill night, we once again found ourselves hanging out at Horn’s, enjoying a few beers with a small group of our friends. One-by-one, each couple started peeling off from the main contingent, announcing that they were calling it a night. By the time 12:30 a.m. rolled around, it was just Teresa and I left. We didn’t want to sit around the bar and drink by ourselves, but we weren’t ready to throw in the towel on the night either. We decided to walk back to our hotel, get our tandem out of the underground storage area and take a bike ride around the island. No question, this is the coolest experience that I have ever had while on Mackinac Island! As we rolled east past the fort and out of town toward Arch Rock, the familiar glow of street lights gave way to dim moonlight which helped to illuminate the bike path stretching out before us. We biked on through the crisp night air, neither of us speaking much. We just wanted to soak up this new experience. When we reached the backside of the island, we parked our bike on the side of the path and found a little rocky beach where we sat and marveled at the lights of the Mackinac Bridge off in the distance. We sat there for a long while, convinced that we had the entire island to ourselves. And in many ways, we did. It’s one of those magical nights that I’ll never forget, everything about it was absolutely perfect.

#1 Riding the Tandem with Felicia’s Mom, Shar

There was no doubt that this story was going to top my list of favorite memories from that trip. After all, it had to have been everybody else’s favorite moment from the weekend as well. Again, a little set-up is required. Felicia’s mom Shar and her husband Doyle – both of whom have since passed, and who will be sadly missed during the upcoming reunion trip –were always in the mix, familiar fixtures for any size gathering that took place up and down Main Street. Doyle, who was confined to a wheelchair, having recently had his legs amputated due to complications from his diabetes, never let this spoil his enjoyment of the festivities around him, even when his physical limitations prevented him from taking part in a particular activity. Shar, his loving wife, was always there by his side, whether they were sitting together enjoying a cold beer on an outdoor patio, or weaving themselves through the crowded sidewalks on their way to one tourist shop after another. This routine continued for several days, hour after hour spent shopping, eating, drinking and conversing with friends along Main Street. Honestly, I don’t think any of us stopped to think much more about it. For me, something finally clicked after I heard Shar make her third or so comment about how fun riding our tandem looked. I’m not sure why it took me so long to realize that Shar had been foregoing many of these activities herself, understandably reluctant to leave her husband’s side. But at that moment, I decided to do something about it. I turned to Shar, and said, “Come on, let’s go for a ride.”

At first, I don’t think she thought I was being serious. I know this because she said, “You’re not serious.” But in fact, I was. Now the smart thing would have been to let Teresa take her for a ride, you know, let someone who can actually see and has experience steering the tandem take her for a spin. But, like I explained to Shar, “That’s not how I roll.” After Shar mounted the front seat of the tandem, I pushed us off and we rolled away from the curb and out into the crowded street. Almost instantly, Shar started yelling at people in front of us to get out of our way, directing a series of excited yelps and curse words at anyone who darted into our oncoming path. I just sat on the back of the tandem, quietly giggling to myself, thoroughly enjoying the verbal assault that Shar was waging on the unsuspecting pedestrians, fellow bicyclists and even the occasional horse. Then, Shar said something that caught my attention. As we weaved our way through the congested traffic, Shar matter-of-factly said, “OK Chris, we’re going to want to turn to the right a little,” to which I retorted, “You know Shar, mine are stationary handlebars, you are the only one of us doing any steering,” which of course was some brand new information for her to process. Still, for whatever reason, none of this phased me. When we got to the west end of town where things started to open up a bit, I bared down and started pedaling as fast as I could and said, “OK, let’s see what this thing can do!” Our increased speed only added to my enjoyment, as the shrill of Shar’s screams went up a few more octaves, still steering the bike erratically, continuing to scream at total strangers, somehow managing to sprinkle in some new swear words that she must have been keeping in her reserve tank. The whole ride only lasted about 20 minutes or so, but it was probably one of the most hilarious 20-minute stretches that I will ever have the pleasure of experiencing. Shar told me that I made her day, and she was sweet for saying so, but I knew better. It was her, and our death-defying, profanity-filled tandem bike ride that provided a fitting exclamation point to a thoroughly enjoyable weekend.

Good times, great friends and the best of memories.

Chris and Shar riding the tandem bicycle.

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