Forty Minutes West

Holland was founded by Dutch separatists in 1847 and has never stopped mentioning it, which sounds like a marketing decision and is actually a genuine continuity. The heritage here is not a theme; the town was Dutch-speaking within living memory.

Windmill Island Gardens holds De Zwaan, an eight-sided Dutch smock mill somewhere in the region of two hundred and fifty years old, shipped over from the Netherlands and reassembled here. It still turns and it still grinds wheat into flour, which makes it, by common description, the only authentic working Dutch windmill in the United States. Around a hundred and fifty thousand tulips go into the grounds for spring.

Holland State Park puts you on one of Michigan's most visited beaches with a view of Big Red, the Holland Harbor Light, which went up in 1870, stands about forty-two feet and has only worn its famous red since 1956. The north pier boardwalk that gives the best view of it is wheelchair accessible, which is worth knowing because very little else on this coast is.

Tulip Time is the reason people book flights. The 2026 festival ran from 1 to 10 May with two parades and a reported six million tulips planted across the town. It is genuinely large, it is genuinely crowded, and accommodation in both Holland and Grand Rapids tightens for it. If you are visiting in early May, either build the trip around it or deliberately avoid those ten days, because there is no middle course.

Grand Haven sits where the Grand River, the same river that runs through the middle of Grand Rapids, finally reaches the lake. That connection is not a coincidence of geography; it is the reason both towns exist.

The organising feature is the boardwalk, about two and a half paved and flat miles running from the downtown waterfront out along the channel to the beach and the pier. It is the easiest long walk on this coast and the most usable for anyone with mobility limits, pushchairs or a bicycle.

At the end of it is the south pier, with its lighthouses at the far end, and the caution that comes with it. More on the water below; the short version is that a pier is the most dangerous place on a Great Lake and the best place to photograph one.

Grand Haven State Park is a compact beach with a campground behind it, and it does something unusually good: beach wheelchairs and a track chair are available to borrow at no charge from the campground office, which makes this the accessible beach on this stretch of coast.

The thing to stay for is the Musical Fountain, built in 1962 and described as the world's largest of its kind. Water, light and music, about twenty to twenty-five minutes, free, played after dark from Memorial Day to Labor Day and on Friday and Saturday evenings in May and September. Watch it from the waterfront across the channel.

One week to know about: the Coast Guard Festival in late July, which in 2026 ran from the 24th to the 2nd of August with more than thirty-five events, ship tours, parades and fireworks. The town is full.

Saugatuck has been an artists' town since the early twentieth century, when a Chicago art school set up a summer painting colony in the dunes here, and the gallery density downtown is a direct inheritance of that. It is also one of the oldest established LGBTQ+ resort towns in the Midwest, which gives the place a character that Holland, forty minutes north, conspicuously does not share.

The mechanics of a day here are unusual and worth understanding. The town sits on the Kalamazoo River, not on the lake, and the beach is on the far side. To get across you can drive round, or you can take the chain ferry, a hand-cranked boat that pulls itself along a chain laid on the riverbed, takes about five minutes, and is generally described as the last operating chain ferry in the country.

On the far bank, Mount Baldhead is a dune with a staircase up it. Counts differ between about two hundred and eighty and three hundred and three steps, which tells you something about how anybody trying to count while climbing gets on. At the top you look down on the lake, the river mouth and the town.

Down the far side is Oval Beach, the best beach of the three towns on this page and one that has turned up in international shoreline rankings. It runs a defined season, roughly Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, and it charges for parking.

North of town, Saugatuck Dunes State Park is the quiet alternative: no concessions, a walk of some distance through forest and dune before you reach sand, and consequently almost nobody on it in June.