Here is something to do before you die. Take the 204 west from Suttons Bay, a small town in north-west Michigan. Follow the road as it winds its gentle way through Lake Leelanau County. When the 204 hits the 22, turn left.
Drive for precisely four miles until you see a track on the right, which leads away into a dark forest. Drive down the track, through the woods. Notice how it gets sandier under the car wheels. Park in the small area at the end of the track, near the little wooden hut. Notice the sand dunes, huge and imposing. Walk through the dunes to the beach. Look in either direction, it goes on for miles, a gentle curve backed by grassy tussocks. Sit on the beach. Watch the sun set over Pyramid Point and South Manitou Island. Die.
This is Great Lakes country, the area where the US bumps up against Canada. Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior. Each one a different inland sea, hundreds of miles across. Michigan, deeper, large waves, sandy beaches. Huron, shallower, wider, never ending. From the boondocks of Wisconsin, through Chicago and the cutting architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, around to the rust belt and the hell of Gary, Indiana, where children play among burnt-out cars. Up past Detroit, and into America's industrial heart, where men like Henry Ford and Dr John Harvey Kellogg had bright ideas and made history and a fortune. And north, along Michigan state's smart west coast, to a place called Suttons Bay.
Suttons Bay is the type of town you bump into when you were thinking of going somewhere else. We were actually on our way to the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron meets Lake Michigan. It was across the Straits and into the Upper Peninsula where Ernest Hemingway found inspiration for Big Two-Hearted River in the 1920s. Locals still like to refer to it as the "last frontier", where the biggest town is smaller than Luton.
We never got to the Straits. Instead we headed towards Traverse City and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, just south of Suttons Bay. This is the Midwest's Cape Cod and the Hamptons rolled into one, a coastline dotted with the condominiums of the rich Chicagoans who drive the 300 or so miles around Lake Michigan to enjoy clean air and wide open spaces.
Sleeping Bear Dunes is pile after pile of 11,000-year-old sand pushed and pulled hundreds of feet into the air by wind and sea. Glacial action had a hand in forming them and now all the hard work is aimed at stopping humans destroying them. But it's all you can do not to run across the gold-tinged acres, just putting your footprints in a ground constantly shifting and changing.
We had decided to tour the Great Lakes, stopping off when and where the mood took us. It's a strange region that includes one of the biggest, hippest cities the country has to offer in Chicago, and tiny, lonesome hamlets where people keep rifles and 50 tins of baked beans in the cellar for when the federal government comes to get them. Michigan state was where Timothy McVeigh, the man who blew up a bit of Oklahoma because he hated Washington DC, hung out with his bomb-making friends.
We flew to Chicago on the east coast of Lake Michigan. Be awake for the fly-in, one of the most spectacular anywhere in the world. Chicago rises like an urban fist from the flat plains of Illinois, a city, unlike New York, which is well aware it is surrounded by water and takes every advantage of it.
Chicago, the home of the skyscraper with streets wide enough to let the sun hit the pavement, is a good place to start any Great Lakes tour. You can get your fill of city bars and restaurants and trips up skyscrapers (try cocktails at the top of the Hancock Centre at sunset) before you set off into a countryside that quickly leaves city mores behind. It should, of course, be illegal to miss the Art Institute of Chicago or to ignore the city's remarkable black history.
We travelled north first, into Frank Lloyd Wright country. Wright is the man who launched the Prairie style, a way of building that was not based on pastiches of British Victorian architecture but actually went for struc tures that were wide, low and long, a reflection of the country he lived in.
In Chicago, he built the Robie House, while on the city outskirts, at Oak Park, are his home and studio and the Unity Temple, all monuments to an American who built houses at the turn of the 20th century that still breath the word "modern" today. He used to design his wife's dresses as well, so that she fitted with his interiors.
Heading north out of Illinois and over the state line into Wisconsin, you come to the small town of Racine, where Wright built a suitably stylish headquarters for SC Johnson and Son, the floor-polish moguls.
From Racine, we continued north through Milwaukee, the home of the Miller Brewing Company, before cutting north-east and inland to take the shorter route to Lake Superior. Here the names begin to change; Berlin, Fond du Lac, Wausau, Lamartine, Germania. The northern Europeans settled long ago from the south after the French had come in longer ago from the north.
Slowly, you begin to see other names, as well: Manawa, Shawano, Chequamegon. This was once home, even longer ago, to the Native Americans, a people pushed to the boundaries of a country that was once theirs. Now they live in miserable mobile homes on reservations and the local white population trundle by in their trucks and swear blind that the Indians are a dirty bunch who should sort themselves out and go and make some money.
But on the outskirts is the way that Native Americans make money - casinos. The car parks are packed, a reflection of a clash of cultures that has seen one group - white - looking through a prism at the mess that is the other - Native American.
This is the Northwoods, a huge expanse of land between lakes Michigan and Superior. You left the Middle of Nowhere miles behind and struck out for a place the residents of Nowhere believe pretty remote: woods, glass-calm lakes and no people.
We stayed with Janet Bekkum and her husband, Kermit, a man who must regret like few others a clever idea Jim Henson once had for the name of a green frog puppet. The Bekkums own Ty-Bach, a bed and breakfast about five miles from Lac du Flambeau. The garden runs right down to the water's edge, where you can borrow their canoe and drift away from urban madness.
To listen to the Bekkums is to hear a little bit of forgotten America. Washington DC is a thousand miles away - they worry about taxes and whether the hunting will be good, about President Clinton's fidelity and whether the lake will freeze over before Christmas this year so that everyone can go skating. Everyday before bacon and maple syrup, omelettes and poached apricots, they thank the Lord for all they have.
This is peaceful. Shuffle through the Bekkum's chest of drawers and you can find dog-eared pamphlets on walking through the woods where you might see a woodpecker or a wolf. We saw both and were glad that, when clapping eyes on the latter, we were sitting in a car.
The Bekkums invited us to a fish-fry. This is a traditional Northwoods pastime. You drive in your camper van for about half-an-hour to a bar that has a Miller beer sign in the window and a lot of large trucks outside. Inside is a fog of smoke. Fish-fry is fish and chips. Kermit, a slight man with a hearing aid and an odd line in Norwegian jokes ("What do you call a Norwegian woman in a bra? A Swede"), ate a plateful of fish and chips piled Desperate Dan high. He had a glass of milk with it. When the smile-laden waitress came to see if we wanted more, Kermit said "Sure." I looked at him with a degree of incredulity. "You have to get your money's worth," he said. Eat all you can for $6.99 (£4.50).
From here, you can head north, to Superior and the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, more big skies and wider horizons. Or east and into the Upper Peninsula before cutting back to the Strait of Mackinac and south, past Suttons Bay and something you must really do before you die.
The practicals
A seven night fly-drive to Chicago costs from £339pp with BA Holidays (0870 2424243 or www.baholidays.co.uk). Useful reading: The Upper Great Lakes' Best Bed and Breakfasts.
