Oh lord. Is there anything like driving Up North? It is a rite of passage for a Michigander. And you will never get it right -- even though you'll do it many, many times in your life.
It's hard to get it right because there is always traffic when driving from the Detroit area to Up North.

We all know the best day to drive northbound is a Saturday. On Friday, everyone is going up and it's crazy. On Sunday everyone is coming down and it's crazy, and depressing. The smart thing is to head up Saturday morning, stay at your dank cottage on Saturday and Sunday nights and then drive back Monday morning, come into work late and give your boss some feeble excuse. A sick grandparent is preferred. Just make sure you haven't used a dead-grandparent excuse in the past.
My drive Up North had a twist. My friend and I attended the Dukes of September show at DTE Music Theatre on Friday night. We met up in Lapeer, where he lives, so we had the chance to take my favorite route to DTE -- all back, paved roads -- completely avoiding I-75. We take Lapeer Road south, turn west onto Oakwood Road, then head south on Baldwin, which takes you all the way to Clarkston Road. Then you head west just a couple miles and enter the venue going south on Pine Knob Road. That's a swell way to enter, but the problem is that DTE officials won't let you exit the same way. It's a deal the venue made years ago with the few people who live on Pine Knob Road, who don't want a hundred cars coming down their road at 11 pm. 
On this Friday night that didn't matter. We weren't headed back to Lapeer, we were headed Up North  to Interlochen, to see the exact same show on Saturday night.
So when the Dukes of September show ended (with Donald Fagen's wonderful Steely Dan song, "Pretzel Logic") we headed out of DTE, got on I-75 and drove like the wind -- a very tired, red-eyed wind -- till we reached our state campground in Interlochen. The only problem is that upon arriving at 3:30 am we couldn't check into our reserved site. So we slept in our car for about four hours. That's also a rite of passage, if you enjoy wrenched backs and crinked necks. We woke up, still too early to check in, so we drove up through Traverse City and all the way to the top of Old Mission Peninsula. We eschewed the wineries (beer is more than OK, thank-you) parked the car and took a hike through the woods to Grand Traverse Bay. It was beautiful. It's always beautiful to emerge from the woods to find a pristine shoreline, gentle waves and a blue horizon. It gives you a fleeting chance to pretend you're an explorer, and tell yourself that you just might be the first man to view this great body of water. I have an active imagination -- sue me. I took a dip in the bay water in my whitey-tighies (no families around, thank God) and we headed back to Interlochen to set up camp. The quick, chilly dip in the bay allowed me to skip a trip to the squalid camp showers.
Saturday's "Dukes" show was just as good as Friday's, if you really want to know and you probably don't. Warning: The Interlochen venue does not sell alcohol.
I had to return to work Sunday night, so we were forced to bite the bullet the next day and fight the traffic southbound on Sunday afternoon.  We wanted to avoid I-75 so we started angling down to the Detroit area. The trouble spots came when driving on M-115 through Cadillac, where traffic backed up at the main intersection in town. Cadillac Lake is right smack-dab inside the city limits so it does create a drag on local traffic.
I really don't know how people make this Up North drive every weekend of the summer. But once you commit yourself to the cottage life -- and it will soon define you -- you must go Up North every, single weekend. You must.
By the way, the next batch of bad traffic we encountered was all the way back on our beautiful Hall Road, where construction barrels closed two lanes. And guess what -- no crews were working. Hey, it was Sunday. The workers were probably partying Up North.