The National Cherry Festival takes over Traverse City for eight days in early July, and if you can time your visit to coincide with it, the combination of a lovely lakeside setting and a genuinely old-fashioned American festival is hard to beat. Events spread from the waterfront along the bay to the downtown streets: parades, live music, cherry pie competitions, a midway, and an air show that draws large crowds to the waterfront.
The Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas produce over 70 percent of the tart cherries grown in the United States, and the festival takes this identity seriously. You can sample cherry wines, cherry salsa, cherry-glazed pork, and cherry ice cream in a remarkable number of forms. Outside of festival week, the orchards are worth visiting in their own right — the drive out Old Mission Peninsula in late May, when the trees are in blossom, is one of the prettiest in Michigan.