- Hello everyone.

Matthew Ozanich here and welcome to another installment of Destination Michigan.

We're coming to you today from Max and Emily's in Downtown Mount Pleasant, which we'll learn more about a little bit later in the program.

Today's adventure will stretch all across the map taking us from the Great Lakes shoreline on a hot summer's day to the quiet beauty of a cold winter's day in the woods up north.

We'll head back in time, look forward to the future, and make a few new friends.

Let's go ahead and take a peak at where we'll be heading today.

We get our wintertime adrenaline fix as we head to Snow Snake in Harrison for some snow tubing.

Then we'll slow things down with a horse draw sleigh ride through the woods of northern Michigan.

After that we'll warm up with a summer's day trek through the hotspots of Port Huron.

We'll also see some rare color photos of the building of the Mighty Mac and grab a bite at Max and Emily's in Mount Pleasant.

All of that is coming your way on this episode of Destination Michigan.

(upbeat music) To kick off today's adventure we're heading to Snow Snake in the town of Harrison.

It's been in the family for three generations now and in the late '90s they added on snow tubing to their outdoor adventure offerings.

While the crew here at Destination Michigan just had to check it out.

So Courtney Jerome now takes me and camera guy Adam to the top of the hill at Snow Snake in Harrison.

- When it's a slightly brisk, yet beautiful winter day in Michigan, what do you do?

You get bundled up and you grab yourself a tube and go snow tubing.

- If you're in central Michigan and you wanna have fun, this is the place to be.

- [Courtney] I couldn't have said it better myself.

Tubing down these 10 acres on Snow Snake's 450 acre property is a great way to experience the outdoors and feel that need for speed.

The bonus?

The only skill you need to have is the ability to roll out of a tube at the top of the hill because they pull you up it.

Once you're there, just make the decision on what run you wanna try.

- We have the screamer, the sleeper, the salad bowl, and the roller.

The screamer if you come on any busy day always has the longest line.

You can always tell by that, the longest line is the best run and it's definitely the screamer.

The sleeper, it's good.

A little bit slower than the screamer.

Next to that on the red lift we have the salad bowl.

That one takes you in and just curls you around like you're in a salad bowl.

Then the roller has three or four nice dips.

That's how it got it's name.

- [Courtney] As you can tell, Matthew and I were a bit partial to the screamer and sleeper runs.

Tubing both solo and tandem to get more speed.

After a little while we wanted to try out JOhn's tip to going even faster and add on a third tube as they allow groups of up to five if the conditions are right.

It didn't take much to twist Adam's arm and have him join us.

- The one thing about tubing that everyone really likes is that you don't need any special equipment.

We have the equipment here.

You dress warm, you come here, and you go tubing.

If you're a skier or a snowboarder, you have to have the equipment or you have to rent the equipment.

Tubing is simpler.

You can come and tube for an hour or two and have a great time and not have to invest a lot of money in it.

Whereas in skiing, which is great fun, snowboarding is great fun also, but you do need to have equipment and you need to practice.

You have to learn how to negotiate the hills and get down.

Tubing is for all ages.

You have to be 36" tall and able to ride in a tube by yourself to come tubing.

We do have some peanut tubes, double tubes, that the little ones can sit in the front and you can sit in the back.

We do see a lot of different size groups that come.

Church groups, school groups, families on the weekends.

Obviously the kids like to go a little longer than the adults but the adults come every year.

Seems like we have a lot of people that say, hey, we gotta do tubing.

Every year, check, gotta come out and get our tubing in.

- [Courtney] Sound like a full, family experience?

Well, it is.

Whether you prefer to drop your kids off to explore while you enjoy the warmth of the lodge or fire pit, or if you join in on the fun along with them, hit the hill and feel those cold flakes on your face.

- Snow Snake is just a great outdoor family experience.

Somewhere you can go in the winter and be outside, enjoy the outdoors and get some fresh air.

- Snow Snake in Harrison has more than just snow sports, they're a four season destination with a zip line, golf course, bike trails, and off roading.

Plus they have educational programs available to help guide your way.

More information can be found at snowsnake.net.

Even during a harsh Michigan winter, spending time outside has never been more popular than it is right now.

But for some very large four legged animals, it's all they've ever known and they've become quite the tour guides leading visitors through the beautiful woods in northern Michigan.

We hand things off to Stefanie Mills now as she pays a visit to Fantail Farm.

- They all have a special something they do good.

Haylee doesn't like parades, but Hannah doesn't care.

Fergus and Finn will do just about anything but they tend to be kind of pokey.

Haylee and Hannah are a little more forward and honest and can get a job done a little bit quicker.

- [Stephanie] Susan Zenker sounds like a very proud mom.

- Haylee's our big girl.

She does a lot of our single horse work, Haylee does.

Hannah, even though she's six months pregnant, we're still working her.

We'll put her both in a team with her sister or we'll put her on a single sleigh.

People say, "Oh, they're so big."

- [Stephanie] Big, real big.

Some tip the scale at over a ton.

Susan of course is talking about her herd of nine draft horses that she and her husband Craig are raising on their farm, Fantail Farm, near Benzonia.

This 120 acre farm has been in her family since the mid 1960s.

Filled with woods and wildlife, it's a perfect way to spend time with loved ones outside.

- [Susan] I've been driving horses since 2006 and that's what culminated this whole thing.

In 2015 as we accumulated more horses, most of our business at that time was not sleigh rides.

It was offsite stuff doing things for the villages and just personal stuff.

Last year was our first big sleigh ride season.

- [Stephanie] This whole thing started with Levi.

He's the gorgeous black and white draft horse.

But he has allergies so he needs a break in the summer.

With Levi out, they needed another horse and then another, and another.

- It's in your blood.

There's something about it.

We have people come with these little kids.

"Oh, she's always wanted a horse."

I said, "Be careful 'cause you're starting something."

- [Stephanie] Draft is a name for pulling something.

For today's ride we were pulled by half brothers Fergus and Finn.

- We tell people to estimate being here at least an hour and 15 minutes.

The sleigh ride actually is 45 to 55 minutes.

We have four break stops for the horses out on the trail that we take and that allows people to ask questions and look around.

We have about six deer that are hanging around this winter.

We'll see cotton tail rabbits, we'll see rough grouse, sometimes we'll see eagles and some of the other birds.

We'll see tracks, coyote, fox, and sometimes we'll see a bobcat track in the wintertime.

- [Stephanie] In the fall you can tour the colors at the farm.

People can also spot members of the herd taking part in community events across the region.

From parades to carnivals, who doesn't wanna get up close with these gentle giants?

- I think my favorite part actually is all the people that we meet.

We have people come, this is new for them.

The second favorite part of course is the horses.

They're our, what are they honey?

They're our pride and joy.

- The herd varies in weight from about 1700 to 2200 pounds and in the winter months they can eat as much as 40 pounds of hay per day.

To learn more information can be found at their website, fantailfarmllc.com I think it's about time we warm things up a little bit so for our next story, we're spending a summer's day along the waterfront in one of Michigan's most beautiful lakeside cities, Port Huron.

As you'll soon see, there's much more to the story than sandy shores and blue water.

Here we are in downtown Port Huron.

It's a beautiful summer's day and this city is a place I've been to a couple of times, but I've always wanted to learn more about it.

We're gonna be meeting up with Andrew Kercher of Port Huron Museums.

He's gonna take us to the Fort Gratiot lighthouse, take us underneath the Blue Water Bridge and show us some of the few hotspots that are around Port Huron that you're definitely gonna wanna visit on your next trip.

Let's go hit the road and take a look at Port Huron.

To kick off our Port Huron excursion, we meet up with Andrew at the Fort Gratiot Light station.

- I figure if anyone comes to Port Huron, this is probably the thing they are most likely to see and for good reason.

We're on the ground of the Fort Gratiot light station.

This is actually the oldest light station in the state of Michigan.

It's pretty cool.

Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state.

There's a lot of people who love lighthouses and you'd really be remiss if you missed this one.

We were really presented with a conundrum of what do you interpret at a light station like this?

What stories do you tell?

This lighthouse has been in operation longer than any other in the state.

In the 1930s it became a pretty logical choice for us to make.

That's because it marks the end of the lighthouse establishment and civilian lighthouse keepers but the 1930s it transitions to being Coastguard control.

There's still an active Coastguard base right next door.

All of these buildings were used by the Coastguard until just a little over a decade ago.

The 1930s is also really important for Port Huron because one of the coolest pieces of infrastructure in the whole state was build in 1938, the Blue Water bridge opened.

- [Matthew] Just down river from the Fort Gratiot lighthouse is arguably Port Huron's most famous landmark, the Blue Water Bridge.

- Everywhere else you go in the state, when you say the bridge everyone's talking about the Mackinac bridge.

When you're in the thumb, when you're in Port Huron and you talk about the bridge, you're talking about this bridge.

- [Matthew] The bridge connects Port Huron to the city of Sarnia Ontario across the river.

- It was a collaborative effort between the United States and Canada to build that bridge.

It was dedicated to international peace in 1938.

Of course the traffic, this is the second busiest international boarder crossing in the country, if not the Western Hemisphere.

One of the busiest, certainly in the whole world.

By the 1990s the one bridge just wasn't cutting it anymore and they built a second one.

A lot of people said it should be an exact copy.

We don't care if it's obsolete, it would look weird if it isn't.

But the engineers actually came up with a compromise.

It has almost the exact same shape and profile, but it provides a unique contrast between new and old.

It's still incredibly busy and incredibly important boarder crossing.

- [Matthew] In the shadow of The Blue Water Bridge stands a train depot dedicated to Port Huron's most famous former resident, Thomas Alva Edison.

- Thomas Edison is definitely Port Huron's favorite sign.

He's not born here.

He was actually born in Milan, Ohio.

But moves up here at a very young age.

This is where he gets his start, his interest in science, technology, and inventing.

He gets a job very early on as a teenager at that railroad station.

His job, he was selling newspapers, candy, apples.

- [Matthew] Edison's job at the train station granted him an outlet to put his creativity to good use.

- Eventually started printing a newspaper on the train.

He'd print that up on one little page on a little galley press in the back of the train and sell it right then and there.

That's like 1860s Twitter.

That is information as fast as it comes back then.

Being world famous was always a treat for the people of Port Huron when he'd come back home and visit.

If you come to Port Huron you'll notice there are a lot of things named after Thomas Edison.

- [Matthew] Our next stop in Port Huron was something that was completely new to me.

In my travels I've seen plenty of lighthouses, but this was the first time I've ever seen a lightship.

- A lightship is a floating lighthouse.

Anchors itself on the danger and has a light just like a lighthouse.

You can see it at the top of the mast there, there's actually two of them.

We think about a big storm, it's always good to be able to maneuver your ship out of waves, this is anchored.

It's gonna go up and down, and slam up and down and side to side and you have to stay in the same spot as best you are able to warn other sailors about that danger.

The Huron was actually the very last of the lightships on the Great Lakes.

This one was being used until 1970, which is pretty crazy when you think about how late that is.

An important part of Blue Water area history as well as a fascinating part of just Great Lakes history in general.

- [Matthew] After hopping all around town, Andrew and I wrap up our Port Huron tour in the city's vibrant and bustling downtown.

Right at the mouth of the Black River.

- To walk from one end of downtown to the other might take you 45 minutes but you can see something from almost every decade going back to the 1840s.

I think in the '90s like a lot of places across Michigan and the Midwest, a mall drew lots of people to outside of town and downtown was pretty deserted.

It's exactly the opposite now.

Every store downtown is either open or undergoing construction, sometimes else is coming in new.

We're got things for families, we have historic places you can visit, we've got a great beach you can spend the day outdoors, you can spend it indoors, there is something for literally everyone in Port Huron in a small town atmosphere.

I think cool things are happening here.

We've got a great influx of young people coming in.

We have one of the greatest return of new college grads, are coming back to St. Clair County.

They're coming back to Port Huron, coming into these downtown shops, into these lofts and really revitalizing the town.

I'm excited to see where things are going.

- If you wanna dive even deeper into the history and beauty of Port Huron, you can head to the Port Huron Museum's website at phmuseum.org.

For our next story we're gonna be trading one bridge for another as we head further north to the tip of the mitt.

The Mackinac bridge was built in the mid '50s and during it's construction west Michigan based photographer Henry Zeman snapped spectacular and rare color photos.

Henry Zeman passed in 2015 but now his family is sharing his incredible images with the world.

Most photos of the building of the Mackinaw Bridge that you're likely to come across will look like this.

An impressive sight for sure, but even more impressive is a sight like this.

Color photography was still relatively uncommon during the mid 1950s so most photos of the bridge's construction are in black and white.

But between 1954 and 1957 west Michigan based photographer Henry Zeman would snap these incredible color photos.

Henry was a photographer for the Grand Rapids Press from 1952 to 1987.

During his career that spanned decades Henry would photograph presidents, athletes, and what was perhaps most close to his heart, the beauty of the outdoors.

He had numerous photos make their way into publications like Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Illustrated.

However, these stunning photos of Michigan's most famous landmark weren't an assignment for Henry.

These pictures were a part of his personal collection and after Henry's passing in 2015, his family decided to share them with the world.

- We had all seen them when were kids and things, but they were just sitting in the basement collecting dust.

There's really no way to really view them.

What we did is we sent them off and had them digitized.

A smattering of them I sent out, the bridge photos, because I knew the historical significance of them.

In looking what was out there, there really wasn't that great a photographs out there.

There was virtually no color.

When he was shooting most of the time for the press during those years, it was all black and white.

I don't think they really used much color at all until much, much later than that.

These would have been things that he shot on his personal camera when he was also up there doing other things.

- [Matthew] Through out the series of photographs, you can witness the construction of the bridge in multiple stages of completion.

In some shots, huge sections of the bridge's massive 3800 foot span are completely gone.

One of the most striking differences though between the bridge we see today and the one in Henry's photographs is the coloring of the bridge.

The barren steel super structure without it's trademark paint job makes the Mighty Mac almost unrecognizable.

(upbeat music) We also see lots of shots of the crews working on the bridge.

The brave workers who toiled for years to make this seemingly impossible feat a reality.

(upbeat music continues) - [Paul] I think this was something that was a little special to him.

He spent a lot of time in the UP.

He went over there quite a bit.

He talked about before the bridge and always riding the ferry and that type of thing.

I think he was always pretty proud to be able to say that he was able to photograph that during it's construction.

As you can see by some of the photographs he was able to get on the bridge and up the towers and he had rein to go in certain places during that construction because of his press credentials.

He was married in '54 and I know they went to the UP during their honeymoon and some of the photographs in there were at the start of the building of the bridge.

They were taken on this honeymoon, for example.

- [Matthew] Thanks to Henry's passion for photography a monumental moment in Michigan's history will live on for years and years to come.

But with a career that spanned nearly 40 years these photos are just the tip of the iceberg of Henry's photographic collection.

- You can imagine, here's a person that's got a life's work of photograph and it all ended up in my basement, by the way.

Down there, I would have to guess and say there's probably a million photographs between slides and negatives.

- Now we're gonna wrap things up today right here in the town of Mount Pleasant.

Home of Central Michigan University.

Maroon and gold pride burns bright right here inside one of the community's most popular eateries, Max and Emily's.

Located in the heart of downtown, Stefanie Mills shows us how they give back one meal and one melody at a time.

- We view you as family.

When you come inside these four walls we want you to have the best experience possible.

- [Stephanie] The tasty sandwiches may bring you into Max and Emily's but odds are the smiles, stories, and good company will keep you coming back.

This downtown staple is always finding ways to lift up it's community thanks to one idea after another.

- We've been doing sandwiches since the early '90s.

Trying to think outside of what a normal sandwich might be.

If I go to the grocery store to pick up a sandwich, stuff to make a sandwich, I'm gonna get some turkey, some ham, lettuce, tomato, mayo, maybe pickle, some bread and go home and make a sandwich.

Here we like to think outside of that.

What's something that you're not gonna create at home?

- [Stephanie] Owner Chris Walton, more affectionately known as Elmo began his career here while he was a college student just down the road at Central Michigan University.

Little did he know what a journey the path to the restaurant would lead him on.

- Like all kids in their 20s I needed a job, I was in college.

It didn't take long to learn that what it was that Tim was doing here at the time was something different, it was something special.

- [Stephanie] Tim Brockman owned the restaurant for just over 20 years.

His love for the community was well known and the impact he had on it is still felt, like with the People Helping People program which started in 2016 and continues today.

- Tim learned that the soup kitchens closed on Sundays.

If you are a member of our community and you needed a meal, you didn't have any place to go on Sunday.

One of the things that he'd always say was, that's not okay.

No one should go hungry in our community.

Together Tim and myself and the staff here created People Helping People which is our program were on Sundays you can come down and get a meal at no charge.

It's gonna be a sandwich, chips, pasta salad, potato salad, soup in the winter when it's cold, fresh fruit, at no charge because no one should ever go hungry in our community.

- Max and Emily's has about 80 sandwiches and the menu is still growing.

All it takes is a great idea and a conversation with Elmo.

- Our sandwiches come from lots of different places.

Some are our creations, some are our guest's creations, some are something that maybe we might have borrowed from another restaurant.

We try to tie that in together.

If it's something that we create here, we want it to mean something to us.

Something clever, something fun.

Maybe it's the person that created it, maybe it's a funny story of where it came from.

If it was a guest creation, who was the guest?

What do you wanna name your sandwich?

Guests have named them everything from the fiery turkinator, we did the King Arthur because it's a giant king sized sandwich.

We thought it was clever.

Some sandwiches have musical references, whether it's the Tom Pesty, or the Southern Man, there's no rhyme or theory behind it.

It's just for fun.

- [Stephanie] Speaking of fun, another one of their well known events if the Max and Emily's summer concert series which gives families a chance to enjoy live music for free with acts that have included Jeff Daniels and The Verve Pipe in the past.

The event also raises money for local charities.

- So summer concert started in 2008.

Oddly enough we had a guest how lives out in California come in and she said, "I love this place.

I haven't played Mount Pleasant in eight years, would it be okay if I come and did a concert at Max and Emily's?"

Yeah, we'd love that.

That sounds like a great idea.

That first year we had 700, 800, a thousand people just come down, hang out downtown, hang out outside, sit in their lawn chairs and listen to great music.

Over the years it's grown into not only a staple of summertime, but a place where you can come and really listen to some unique bands.

- [Stephanie] From music to meals to memories, it's easy to see how this restaurant with it's working named sandwiches quickly gets woven into the mental fabric of students and families for generations.

- I love when someone discovers Max and Emily's as a freshman or a sophomore and then they come here often and one of the things that's special to us is that when you come down here, we're not going to call you Mrs. Mills.

We're gonna call you Stephanie.

You are family to us.

Getting to know these students as they go, as they grow and as they graduate, it's a great opportunity to serve great sandwiches to great people.

It's an opportunity to make a difference in our community, make a difference in our staff's lives, and try and make sure that the world's better because of a great sandwich.

- To learn more about Max and Emily's and their People Helping People program information can be found on their website maxandemilys.com With that this episode of Destination Michigan comes to a close and from everyone here, thank you so much for joining us on today's adventure.

We'll catch you next time.

(upbeat music)