Cross Village — a stop on the Tunnel of Trees.
Coming into Cross Village now, at the north end of the road, and this small place is one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the entire state of Michigan.
It began as an Odawa village and has been lived in ever since — through the French, the British, the Americans, the timber era and the tourist era. The name comes from a large cross that stood on the bluff here, visible from the water, which travellers used the way their predecessors had used the crooked tree.
There is not much here now: a scattering of houses, a church, a township hall, and the one building that brings people up this road as much as the trees do. That is the Legs Inn, and it is a genuinely extraordinary thing to find at the end of a country road in northern Michigan — a Polish restaurant built out of stone, driftwood and tree roots by a self-taught immigrant artist, with a row of cast-iron stove legs along the roofline.
Boone has that story, and it is the best one on this road.
Park up. Look at the building for a minute before you go in — the more you look, the stranger it gets.