Dune buggies and asparagus: Oceana's unlikely double crown

Oceana County holds two titles nobody else can touch. The first is loud: Silver Lake State Park, where 2,000 acres of bare, Sahara-style dunes pile up between Silver Lake and Lake Michigan — the only sand dunes in Michigan where you can legally drive, in the park’s famous ORV area. All summer the dunes hum with buggies and Jeeps cresting the ridges (Mac Wood’s Dune Rides has hauled the less-equipped since 1930), while the quiet end of the park offers plain old spectacular hiking and a lighthouse at Little Sable Point that’s one of the most photographed in the state.

The second title is delicious: Oceana calls itself the Asparagus Capital of the World, and in June the county seat of Hart throws the National Asparagus Festival — parade, asparagus queen, asparagus food alley, the works — honoring the sandy-soil crop the county grows more of than almost anywhere in America. Between the dunes, the spears, Pentwater’s classic harbor village, and the Hart-Montague bike trail stitching it together, Oceana is up-north Michigan with the volume knob that goes both ways.