Mark Naida

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | Mark Naida

Last week, the owner of Sister Pie, the iconic Detroit bakery, announced it would be taking a hiatus due to a financial crisis after a decade of serving treats. A sad story, and one that we’re all too familiar with: Restaurants, bars, and cafes are a tough business, after all—so many places didn’t come back after Covid. Five years on, it’s hard to even remember some of our beloved haunts.

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | Mark Naida

In September 2015, a man named Tim O’Brien waded out into shallow water near Northport in the Leelenau Peninsula and proceeded to dig a 93-pound Petoskey Stone with a trowel. It wasn’t polished up and easily identifiable as a Petoskey stone, but looking closely, the pattern of fossilized Hexagonaria coral was clear. He set it in front of his home in the tiny village of Copemish and posted a photo of it on Facebook, where it went viral.

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | Mark Naida

Big Rapids — Getting skunked on your first hunt is a time-honored tradition. Teenage boys with shiny new rifles will sit up freezing in stands outside all November and come home with nothing year after year on their journeys to become men. Here I was, twice that age, undergoing that right of passage while stalking turkeys. I came home with neither a cooler full of turkey breast nor a fan to hang on my wall.

3 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | Mark Naida

Romulus — Metro Detroiters make weird vacation choices. In high summer, they fly to Disney World to bake in the Florida sun and scan the roadside for alligators. Or they make a quick eight-hour drive to Pigeon Forge to hide in the shade at Dollywood. Worse, people fly off to Cancun or the Dominican Republic to sweat through their Tommy Bahamas and get stung by jellyfish. These trips make sense in winter, but given school schedules, they too often happen during warm months.

3 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | Mark Naida

Paris — Just north of Big Rapids is a quaint crossroads with a cabinet maker, a taxidermist, a pizza joint, an antique dealer—and a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, of course. There are at least 23 towns in the U.S. named after the French capital, but ours is not one of them. John Parish platted this village of 270 souls in 1865, and after a fire about a decade later, the “h” fell off the town’s name. “Parish” became “Paris.”This little village was once home to the state’s second fish hatchery.