Why we picked Exit 190.

Ask anyone who grew up driving I-75 north and they will tell you the same thing about Standish: it is where the trip starts to feel like the trip. The Detroit suburbs are gone. The flats are gone. Bay City is in the rearview. If you are headed to the cottage, the lake, the AuSable, or the Bridge, you are within forty minutes of being on a lake road.

That is why we picked Exit 190.

Josh and Chase grew up making this drive. So did most of the people who walk into the Standish store on a Friday afternoon in May. The conversation at the counter is almost always the same: where are you headed, when did you leave, how is traffic at the Zilwaukee. It is a conversation we have been part of long before we were a dispensary.

The math of Exit 190.

Exit 190 is the M-61 exit. It is the only exit in Standish on I-75 that puts you within a mile of a working downtown, a working farmers market, and a working drive-through window. (Ours opens at 9 AM, every day of the week.) The other Standish exit, 188, is for US-23 and the casino. They are two miles apart. They do different jobs.

If you are headed to the Sunrise Coast, you take Exit 188 to follow US-23 east along Lake Huron. If you are headed to the inland lakes around Gladwin, Houghton, and Higgins, or you want a drive-through coffee and a place to stretch on the cottage drive, you take Exit 190 to M-61. We sit half a mile west of the exit ramp.1

From wheels-off-the-exit to the drive-through window, the median is under three minutes.

That number matters. It is the reason a lot of regulars stop with us on the way up and again on the way home. Not because we have anything that the bigger stops south of Bay City do not have. Because we are sixty seconds further off the highway, with a place to park, a counter where someone will answer the question you walked in to ask, and a back exit that puts you right back on M-61 heading west or east, whichever direction you need.

If you want the full math on parking, the drive-through, the cross-streets, and the hours, the Exit 190 reference page lays it out in one screen. This post is the why.

A crossroads, not a junction.

Standish was a railroad town before it was a highway town. Trains first reached Standish in 1871, on the line that became the Michigan Central, and the city grew up around the depot. The Michigan Central Standish Depot is still standing on Main Street and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is now the Arenac County Welcome Center.2 The 1871 plat that became downtown Standish was laid out by John D. Standish, who owned the land in the area. (For a brief stretch in those early years the town was called Granton, before the name reverted.)3

The roads came later. M-61, the route our Standish store sits on, was one of the original state highways signed by 1919, and the easterly extension that brought M-61 into downtown Standish was officially established on May 24, 1929.4 M-61's eastern terminus is downtown at the corner of Cedar Street and Main, where it joins US-23. Before I-75 was finished in November 1973, US-23 was the main route from Bay City to the Bridge, and it ran straight through downtown Standish. The interstate segment from Kawkawlin north past Standish opened in October 1967, which moved the through-traffic onto the freeway and changed what Standish was for. It stopped being a town you drove through and became a town you exited into.5

That history is the reason Standish is the way it is. It is the crossroads where I-75, US-23, and M-61 meet. US-23 from Standish north is now the official Sunrise Coast Pure Michigan Byway, a 200-mile state-designated scenic route that runs the Lake Huron coast to Mackinaw City.1 So when you take Exit 188 and turn east, the Sunrise Coast begins at the first stoplight. There is a Welcome Center for it in the old railroad depot.

What we knew when we picked the corner.

We did not pick the corner because of any of that history. We picked it because we grew up driving by it and we knew what it felt like to stop there. The history is something we read later, in the city of Standish timeline, after we had already signed the lease.

What we knew at the time was simpler:

• Most of the people we wanted to serve already drove past this exit four or six or twelve weekends a year.
• The drive-through window meant a cottage Friday could mean a sixty-second stop, not a fifteen-minute store walk.
• The M-61 corridor was already where the working economy of the area lived. We were not parachuting in. We were one storefront on a street that had been working since the railroad.
• Au Gres, twenty-two miles east on US-23, gave us a second location on the actual Sunrise Coast for people who were already past Standish or coming back from the cottage Sunday.

We knew the cottage drive because we had spent half our lives on it. We had been growing cannabis in basements and barns since 2008, well before the laws caught up to Michigan, and by the time the retail license was an option, the farm was in Standish and the question was where to put the storefronts.Our story goes deeper on the farm part. This post is about the corner.

What it actually looks like.

One last thing.

People sometimes ask us why we did not put the store closer to the casino, or closer to the lake. The honest answer is that the cottage drive does not stop at the casino or start at the lake. It runs through Standish, and Standish has been the where-the-trip-starts-to-feel-like-the-trip stop since before the cannabis was legal, since before the casino was built, and since well before the freeway turned the old US-23 routing into a county road.

If you are passing through, walk in and say where you are headed. We will tell you what we hear from people who already made that drive.