Gerald R. Ford Intl

In the mid-1980s the West Michigan Horticultural Society in Grand Rapids was searching for land to build a botanical conservatory. They asked Frederik Meijer — the founder of the Meijer grocery chain, who had been buying property east of the city for one of his stores — to donate a parcel. Meijer had already bought a wooded tract along an East Beltline creek for a new supercenter. He looked at the land, decided to put his store elsewhere, and donated 70.7 acres for the garden in January 1991. He and his wife Lena then led a $13 million capital campaign, donated their personal sculpture collection, and opened the gardens to the public in April 1995. Thirty years later, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park has been named the best sculpture park in the United States by USA Today's 10Best readers three years running. The Art Newspaper ranks it among the 100 most-visited art museums in the world. The campus is now 158 acres. The 30-acre outdoor sculpture park, added in 2002, holds 300 sculptures from artists including Rodin, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Edgar Degas, Ai Weiwei, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Nina Akamu's 24-foot bronze "The American Horse" — completed from Leonardo da Vinci's original 1493 design that was never cast in his lifetime — is the campus icon and the photograph everyone takes. The 15,000-square-foot, five-story Lena Meijer Tropical Conservatory is Michigan's largest tropical conservatory. The annual butterfly exhibit (March-April) is the largest temporary butterfly exhibition in the nation — visitors walk among thousands of free-flying butterflies from around the world. The 8-acre Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Garden, designed by Hoichi Kurisu and opened June 10, 2015, integrates contemporary sculpture (including a 10-foot Anish Kapoor granite work) with traditional zen elements. The outdoor 1,900-seat amphitheater hosts a major concert series each summer. For a state most Americans don't associate with high art, this is an outlier. Grand Rapids has the country's best outdoor sculpture collection because Fred Meijer skipped one supercenter and gave the land away.

De Zwaan ("The Swan") is the only authentic working Dutch windmill in the United States. It was built in 1761 in the village of Vinkel, North Brabant, the Netherlands, and operated as a grain mill there for two centuries. In 1964 the Dutch government allowed the city of Holland, Michigan to purchase it and ship it across the Atlantic — by special permit, since the Netherlands had passed an export ban on historic windmills after WWII. De Zwaan was reassembled in 1965 on a 36-acre municipal park called Windmill Island Gardens, on the Macatawa River north of downtown. The mill still grinds wheat into flour, ground on the original 1761 millstones; flour from De Zwaan is sold in the gift shop. The mill stands 125 feet tall with sails spanning 80 feet. A Dutch-trained miller operates it.

The lighthouse at the mouth of Lake Macatawa is officially the Holland Harbor Light. Everyone calls it Big Red. The current structure dates to 1907, replacing an 1872 wooden tower that itself replaced an 1866 light. The deep red color is not aesthetic preference — it follows an international maritime convention adopted in the late 19th century: when entering a US harbor from open water, the light on the right (starboard) is red and the light on the left (port) is green ("red right returning"). Holland's harbor light is on the south side of the channel; vessels entering from Lake Michigan keep it to starboard. So it's red. The Dutch settlers who founded Holland in 1847 chose the site for its natural harbor at the mouth of the Black River, where Lake Macatawa opens onto Lake Michigan. The harbor became the commercial outlet for a Dutch farming community that grew into a manufacturing center (Donnelley, Herman Miller, Padnos). The lighthouse keeper's quarters and tower were combined in the 1907 rebuild — unusual for the period — to handle Michigan's brutal winters; the lighthouse keeper lived inside the building. Automated since 1932; the original 5th-order Fresnel lens is now at the Holland Museum downtown. The Holland Harbor Lighthouse is one of the most-photographed lighthouses on the Great Lakes. From Holland State Park's beach on the north side of the channel, the lighthouse sits ~100 yards across the water against the dunes — the iconic Holland postcard. The Mt. Pisgah dune (157 feet) rises immediately behind it; a 200+ step boardwalk to the summit gives the best aerial-equivalent view. Holland itself is worth the visit — Tulip Time Festival (early May) is one of the largest tulip festivals in North America, drawing 500,000+ visitors. The De Zwaan windmill is an authentic 1761 working Dutch windmill brought from the Netherlands in 1964 — the only one in the US that the Dutch government has permitted to be relocated.

KBIV puts you near Saugatuck, at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River on Lake Michigan's east shore. From the air the signature is the dunes: perched dunes, sand piled on bedrock by 10,000 years of wind off the lake, with Saugatuck Dunes State Park holding 1,120 acres and 2.5 miles of undeveloped shoreline. Mt. Baldhead is the big one, a 282-foot dune over the river channel; a 302-step staircase climbs the back, and the open lake-facing slope is a 30-second slide down loose sand. The Air Force ran a Cold War radar site on the summit; the building's gone but the foundations remain. The town has been an artists' colony since the 1880s, with the Ox-Bow School running since 1910, and it still has a hand-cranked chain ferry, the only one left working in the country.