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Fits Like A Mitten, Good Hart, MI (2026)

03/16/2026

Pond Hill Farm started with a teenager, a plowed-up hayfield, and a cooler at the end of a driveway.

Jimmy Spencer's family moved to a property north of Harbor Springs in 1980, when he was four years old. His dad Jim was a financial adviser. Every Saturday, Jimmy would help him on the computer. And every Saturday, he'd think about being outside instead.

At 17, he decided to try farming. He plowed up 10 acres of hayfield and planted vegetables. The weeds grew taller than the crops. He kept going.

He studied agriculture and horticulture at Michigan State, and every summer he'd come home and set out whatever he'd managed to grow at the end of the driveway — a small red cooler, a few buckets of cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, zucchini — with an honest box for the money.

His mom Sharon started canning the surplus. Eventually the family built a little farm market next to the old dairy barn.
That was 30 years ago.

Today Pond Hill Farm is 238 acres, five miles north of downtown Harbor Springs on M-119 — right on the Tunnel of Trees. There's a vineyard with 2,500 vines on a terraced hillside that looks out over Lake Michigan. A winery. A brewery. A cafe with wood-fired pizza. A market stocked with Sharon's canned goods — she puts up around 30,000 jars a year.

Miles of trails with a gnome house hunt that kids lose their minds over.

Goats.

A tubing hill in winter.

Live music.

And a cat named Pumpkin who has become such a celebrity that the farm sells Pumpkin Fan Club sweatshirts and stuffed animals in his honor.

The place has been featured on PBS, profiled in Farm Progress and MyNorth, and picked up a pile of Red Hot Best awards.

Around 2006, a woman named Marci showed up from Arizona looking for a farm job. She arrived with fishing poles strapped to the roof of her car. Jimmy hired her. They got married that fall. Now they have four kids — Emma, JJ, Lily and Sawyer — and all of them work the farm.

The farm is named after the pond Jimmy's dad dug when Jimmy was a kid. It's still there. It's full of trout.

Jimmy once told a reporter his hope is that the land is better as a farm than it would be as another subdivision. 30 years in, it's hard to argue with that.

03/10/2026

If you've ever driven up US-31 north toward Mackinac, you've passed through Alanson. You might not have even noticed. It's a blink of a village — 800 people on the bank of the Crooked River, about 10 miles north of Petoskey — and there's a little log cabin right there on the highway that's easy to blow past without a second thought.

What a big mistake that is...

That log cabin is home to the Dutch Oven, a bakery that's been turning out cinnamon bread with the same recipe since the 1930s.

Alanson was settled in 1875 as a lumber town. When the sawmills closed, the village kept going — quieter, smaller, but still here.

Flay Lacy drove up from Florida, built the cabin with his own hands, and started baking. That was over 90 years ago. Five families have run the place since.

In 2019, Erika and Rob Kennedy took over. They're a Harbor Springs couple who weren't even looking for a bakery. A friend told them they had to see the place.

For Erika, who grew up in Slovakia, it hit different. The from-scratch baking, the European pastries, the gingerbread cookies that reminded her of her mother's kitchen back home.

She kept most of the traditional recipes and started offering a few things her grandmother used to make.

So now, every morning, you've got Linzer tortes and Leckerli and Swiss Biber cakes and perfect donuts and cinnamon bread made from a nearly century-old recipe all waiting for you.

And take it from us... it's all just as delicious as ever.

When the Kennedys first took over, locals kept stopping in to ask if it was still going to be the same place they remembered growing up.

At some point, Rob realized what they'd bought into...

"We thought it's a bakery, we make the doughnuts," he said. "But it's so much more than that."

03/09/2026

"The stars ain't like I remember them/Out Brutus Road in Northwest Michigan/Where the sky's a special kinda black..."

If you've ever driven out past Brutus on a clear night, you know exactly what that line means.

The song is called "Brutus Road." The band that wrote it — the Michigan Rattlers — are four childhood friends from Petoskey: Graham Young, Adam Reed, Christian Wilder and Tony Audia.

They grew up playing music together, working every bar, cafe, and stage in town. Graham's aunt owned a coffee shop and gave them their first gigs.

After high school they scattered. Graham ended up in LA. Talked Adam into driving out to join him. Somewhere on that four-day trip, homesick and needing a name, they called themselves the Michigan Rattlers — after the Massasauga, the rattlesnake native to the state. Graham said later they never would have put Michigan in the name if they'd started the band here.

But from 2,000 miles away, it was the only name that made sense.

Things moved fast. Rolling Stone named them one of "Ten New Country Artists You Need to Know." NPR described their sound as "heavy-hearted folk-rock with an aching dose of Midwestern nice." No Depression called them "a band with solid songwriting chops and instrumental skills." They played Bonnaroo, Firefly, Electric Forest. Released three albums on their own label — Massasauga Records.

Growing up, their heroes were guys like Justin Townes Earle and John Prine. In 2019, they got to open for Earle on a run of shows out west. After Justin passed tragically in 2020, the Rattlers covered his song "Rogers Park" at Saint Andrew's Hall in Detroit. His fans said he would've been proud.

That same year — 2019 — Bob Seger himself handpicked the Rattlers to open his final two shows at Pine K**b. Four guys from Petoskey, parking their little van at the loading dock next to Seger's semis and tour buses, playing in front of 16,000 people. Young put it simply: "Pretty special for a group of kids from Petoskey."

Last fall, the Rattlers announced an indefinite hiatus. 10 years. Hundreds of shows. Every state in the continental U.S.

Their goodbye said it all: "The experiences we shared exceeded anything we ever could've dreamt up as childhood best friends growing up in Petoskey."

Northern Michigan doesn't always get credit as a place that produces great bands. These four made sure the whole country knew exactly where they came from.

Check out this incredible video of "Lilacs Bloom" from their most recent/final album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmUFPgbq6Aw

Ever catch them live? What's your favorite Rattlers song? 👇

03/06/2026

You don't need directions to Good Hart General Store. You just… end up there.

On the way to fish O'Neal Lake. Grabbing something on a Saturday before opening up the cottage. Stopping in because you're on 119 and your body just turns the wheel automatically.

Cliff Powers was a Good Hart local who built that little red building in 1934 — ran it as a grocery, butcher shop, gas station, and eventually the post office. He was behind that counter for almost 40 years.

Then in 1971, a young woman named Carolyn Sutherland decided she'd had enough of the Detroit area — the '67 riots, the GM strike, all of it. She told her parents, who lived in Harbor Springs, "Go find me a business."

They looked at the store on Mother's Day and she opened it by Memorial Day.

She's still there.

For over 50 years now, Carolyn and her husband Jim have run the place — bakery, deli, grocery, post office, real estate office, gift shop, all under one roof.

Her daughter Ami works there too.

Some of the summer kids she's hired are third generation now.

Their grandparents scooped ice cream in the same building.

Not much has changed inside. The 1901 cash register is still there. The glass-front counter bins. The tinted windows Cliff put in. There's a carved oak cooling case that was installed before electricity even reached Good Hart.

Carolyn's famous line: "If you change it, it won't be Good Hart."

Those pot pies — chicken and beef — have gotten so well known that people across the country order them shipped year-round.

But the locals know that the peanut butter chocolate chip sea salt cookies might be the real move.

And when everything else up here closes after color season? That door's still unlocked. Middle of January, snow sideways off the lake.

Some of us have been stopping here our whole lives.

What's your Good Hart order? 👇

03/05/2026

Most people don't know that one of the most acclaimed musicians of his generation grew up right here in Northern Michigan.

Sufjan Stevens moved to the Petoskey area when he was nine years old. He attended Harbor Light Christian School and Petoskey High School. He spent his teenage years in the same small towns we drive through every day — Petoskey, Alanson, the stretch of 131 that somehow feels like the whole world when you're 16.

And then he did something almost nobody does: he wrote an entire album about home.

His 2003 album Michigan was partially recorded in Petoskey. It's a love letter to this state — the lakes, the forests, the rust belt grit, the quiet beauty of the places most people fly over.

Songs about Traverse City. Songs about Sleeping Bear. Songs about the kind of winter that either breaks you or makes you who you are.

He went on to earn an Academy Award nomination, multiple Grammy nominations, and a Tony Award for the Broadway musical Illinoise. Critics regularly call him one of the most important songwriters alive.

But he started here. Walking the same sidewalks. Looking at the same water.

Check out the album here: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kvZ0omXHMGdoVrKkR8tBXyHkzSTGLHcgg

Next time someone asks what comes out of Northern Michigan — you've got an answer. 🎵

Fits Like A Mitten

03/16/2026

03/10/2026

03/09/2026

03/06/2026

03/05/2026

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