Living so close to the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan to be exact), I often take them for granted. Then along comes some­thing new that I hadn’t heard of before. Case in point: The Great Lakes Seaway Trail.

“Great Lakes what?” Exactly. If you’ve never heard of it before, the Great Lakes Seaway Trail is a driving/boating byway that par­al­lels the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes in New York and Pennsylvania. The trail is a National Scenic Byway that includes includes Niagara Falls; 1000 Islands; 29 light­houses; War of 1812 farm and nature sites; lots of har­bors, world-class sport­fish­ing, bridges and fer­ries to and from Canada, and the Seaway Trail Discovery Center.

Most of us don’t give a sec­ond thought to the roads we travel on. But in the first part of the last cen­tury, there were few paved roads, and cer­tainly none of the inter­state high­ways we enjoy these days. Traveling across the United States by car was next to impossible.

In 1912, Carl Fisher, founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, came up with the idea for a ‘Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway.’ Fisher’s plan called for a com­pletely grav­eled con­tin­u­ous high­way run­ning from New York City to San Francisco.