Wetmore, Michigan / Like everyone else on the planet, 2020 walloped me good. In the “before” times, I was on the road six months a year for work, but that ground to a halt when the pandemic started. After 452 days of lockdown uncertainty, my husband and I finally made our first interstate trip—clocking a seven-hour drive from our home in Minneapolis to Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. The plan: eat our faces off at Milkweed Inn, one of the previous year’s most talked-about forest-to-fork destinations from celebrated chef and author Iliana (Lane) Regan.

Fed up with the high-stakes, low-reward restaurant industry, Regan stepped away from their Chicago restaurant and took over an old four-bedroom hunting lodge and its 270 surrounding acres in Hiawatha National Forest in 2019, rapidly transforming it into one of the hottest food destinations in the country. The seasonal, weekends-only inn accommodates just 10 to 12 guests at a time (six in the lodge and four in two canvas tents and 16-foot Airstream), so when we scored a last-minute reservation, we dropped everything to go.

Regan lives on and for the land, and you can taste it in everything they cook. The day we arrived, Regan was stoking a fire in the lodge’s backyard, a lake trout suspended above it. The fish appeared again at that night’s family-style dinner, expertly smoked and flanked by a heavenly ramp pesto, hand-pinched pierogi stuffed with sauerkraut and foraged mushrooms, and a wild strawberry sorbet studded with tender young spruce shoots. The host busted out the s’mores and a bottle of bourbon after dinner, and the guests, some of whom seemed nervous about dining communally in what was possibly the end but also maybe still the middle of the worst pandemic in memory, finally began to loosen up. My husband and I clinked glasses with an orthopedic surgeon, a gym teacher, and an insurance broker who had one thing in common—a love of the outdoors and an appreciation for how Mother Nature feeds us.

With no wi-fi to distract us and the nearest gas station an hour-long schlep by four-wheel drive, we spent that weekend in the woods as Regan’s guests often do: hiking, fly-fishing, trying our unsteady hands at archery, reading (remember books?), and polishing up the social skills that had grown so rusty. Then we’d gather at mealtimes for the most blissfully sublime feasts: salads of mustard greens and violet leaves with koji-fermented black beans, ramp pasta made with stinging nettles and marsh marigold, and cups of mushroom “tea” that tasted just like the woods smelled. Five meals like this, each one more sigh-inducing than the last.

On our final night, a smattering of stars made a grand entrance, flickering like veneers in the inky blackness. It had been ages since I’d seen a show so spectacular. Falling asleep to a chorus of ribbeting frogs and waking up to the smell of country ham, I realized that my return to travel was less about getting back out into the world and more about tucking deeper into its magical Middle Earth. —Ashlea Halpern