Suttons Bay & the Vineyards — a stop on M-22 North.
Coming into Suttons Bay, and the hills on your right are now covered in vineyards — this is the heart of the Leelanau wine country.
The same lake effect that protects the cherry orchards works for grapes: the bay moderates the temperature enough that cool-climate varieties ripen reliably at a latitude that ought to be far too cold for them. Riesling does especially well, and the sparkling wines from up here are genuinely good. There are dozens of tasting rooms within a few miles of this road — and an obvious warning, since you're driving: pick one, or pick a driver.
Suttons Bay itself is a pretty village of galleries and cafes with a marina on the water. It also has one of the more entertaining might-have-beens on the peninsula: in eighteen seventy-one a priest named Andrew Herbstrit platted six thousand lots here for a development to be called Pleasant City, with the proceeds endowing a National University on the shore of the bay. It never happened. There is no university. There are, however, excellent vineyards on the site, which I suspect most people would call a fair trade.
From here it's a straight run down the bay into Traverse City.