An Inland Sea — a stop on M-22 South.
That water out your left window is not a lake in any sense a visitor from elsewhere would recognise, and the numbers are worth carrying.
Lake Michigan is about three hundred miles long and holds roughly thirteen hundred cubic miles of fresh water. It is over nine hundred feet deep in places. It has a horizon — you cannot see Wisconsin from this shore, and people regularly assume they are looking at an ocean and are startled when they taste it.
Together the Great Lakes hold about a fifth of all the fresh surface water on the planet. Not a fifth of America's. The planet's. Stand on this beach and you are looking at one of the largest single deposits of drinkable water on earth, which is a fact that becomes more interesting every decade.
It behaves like a sea, too. It has currents, rip currents, and waves that in a November gale run twenty feet and sink ships. It has its own weather — lake-effect snow in winter, when cold air crosses the open water, picks up moisture, and dumps feet of it on this shore while towns a hundred miles inland get nothing.
And it is cold. Even in August the water off this coast can sit in the fifties, because an offshore wind drags the warm surface layer away and cold water rises to replace it. A beach that was pleasant yesterday can be shocking today. Treat it with the respect you would give an ocean, because in every way that matters to a swimmer, it is one.