from Hell to Paradise

Michigan is one of the few places where you can literally drive from Hell to Paradise before dinner, and somehow the route makes perfect geographic sense.

Hell, Michigan sits in the Lower Peninsula near Ann Arbor. Paradise is way up in the eastern Upper Peninsula on the shore of Lake Superior. Put the two into a map and you get one of the most wonderfully Michigan road trips imaginable.

According to the route shown here, the trip covers about 338 miles and takes roughly 5 hours and 4 minutes. More importantly, getting there requires one essential Michigan experience: crossing the Mackinac Bridge.

Start in Hell, head north through the Lower Peninsula, cross the Straits of Mackinac, and keep going into the U.P. until you reach Paradise.

There is something almost suspiciously perfect about those names.

You can tell somebody you woke up in Hell, crossed one of the world's most recognizable suspension bridges, entered the Upper Peninsula, and arrived in Paradise that afternoon. To anyone unfamiliar with Michigan geography, that sounds like the beginning of a very strange story.

To a Michigander, it is just a road trip.

And the destinations themselves could hardly sound more different. One has a name practically designed for jokes, while the other sits in the U.P. beside the cold blue expanse of Lake Superior.

Michigan already looks unusual on a map, with two peninsulas surrounded by Great Lakes water. Apparently that wasn't distinctive enough, so we also ended up with Hell and Paradise in the same state.

Only in Michigan can “I drove from Hell to Paradise today” be a completely reasonable answer to “Where have you been?”