One perfect lakeshore day
Three towns, about forty miles of shoreline, and a route that only really works if you drive it south to north. Here is the day I give people who have one day.
Start in Holland, before the town is awake
Get to downtown Holland early. Eighth Street is the main run, and at eight in the morning it belongs to people walking dogs and opening shutters. The sidewalks here are heated — there is a snowmelt system running under the brick — which is a strange thing to notice in July, but it tells you something about how seriously this town takes its downtown.
Get a coffee, walk the length of it, and then make one decision: Windmill Island or the beach. De Zwaan, the windmill on Windmill Island Gardens, is the real thing — a working Dutch mill, moved here in the 1960s, and the last one the Netherlands ever let leave the country. If you would rather be on the water, drive out to Holland State Park instead and look at Big Red, the red lighthouse across the channel that is on roughly every postcard in town.
Either way, be back in the car by ten. The rest of the day is north of here and the parking situation gets worse by the hour.
Saugatuck for the middle of the day
Saugatuck is twenty minutes down the lakeshore and it is the part of the day people remember. The town sits on the Kalamazoo River just before it opens into Lake Michigan, so there are two different waterfronts to choose from, and they feel nothing alike.
Oval Beach is the one you came for: wide, soft, properly big water. If the lot is full — and by noon in August it will be — park in town and take the chain ferry across the river instead. It is hand-cranked, it has been running in one form or another since the 1830s, and it costs about as much as a postcard. On the far side, the stairway up Mount Baldhead is a little over three hundred steps of pure regret that pays out completely at the top: the whole river mouth, the dunes, and the lake going flat and silver to the horizon.
Eat in town. Wander the galleries if it is raining. Do not plan this part too tightly.
Grand Haven for the last hour of light
Now drive north. This is the part of the plan that people push back on, because by four o'clock everyone is sandy and tired and Grand Haven is another forty-five minutes. Do it anyway.
Park near the boardwalk and walk out the south pier. There are two lights out there and the far one, the inner light, is the red catwalk shape you have seen a hundred times without knowing where it was. Sunset over the pier is the single most photographed thing in West Michigan and it is photographed that much for a reason.
Then stay for the fountain. The Grand Haven Musical Fountain has been running on the hillside across the channel since 1962 and it still draws a crowd onto the boardwalk in the dark every summer night. It is completely free, it is a bit old-fashioned, and it is the correct way to end this day.
If you only have half a day
Cut Holland. Start at Oval Beach around eleven, climb Mount Baldhead, then drive straight to Grand Haven for the pier and the fountain. You lose the quiet morning, which is a genuine loss, but you keep the two best hours.
One practical note: every state park on this list needs a Michigan Recreation Passport to park, and it is far cheaper added to your licence plate than bought at the gate. Check the fountain's schedule before you commit to the evening — it runs nightly in high summer and tapers off either side of it.