Book excerpt: Here are 19 backroads drives around Lake Michigan, showing you the grand lake as never before in this richly illustrated exploration of the Great Lake’s history, culture, ecology, and natural beauty. The big blue inland sea--the only Great Lake entirely within U.S. borders--appears here in all its natural diversity. These day trips take you to the ancient forests and vast sand dunes of Michigan and Wisconsin and on beautiful backroads in Illinois and Indiana. Lake Michigan Backroads conducts readers through the lake’s varied landscapes and seasons, pausing at popular and little-known destinations for a look into life on the lake then and now.  Here are the shining blue waters plied by the Chippewa and Menominee, by the Jesuits and the voyageurs, and by countless immigrants seeking a new life. And here, in brilliant photographs and historical images, in anecdotes and thoughtful text, are their stories, inextricable from the story of the Great Lake itself. Lake Michigan Backroads speaks eloquently of remarkable natural resources and great promise, of immigration and trade, of devastating storms and human calamity, and of the people and their love of the lake. And their story plays out against Robert Domm’s exquisite images, which evoke the lake’s greatness through its days of calm and of stormy fury, the play of sunlight on its surface and the sweep of its shore in both autumn finery and the restless ice of winter.