This is funny, in a sad-funny-because-they’re-bigots kind of way: The Michigan GOP is attacking Abdul El-Sayed, whom they have come to call Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, because someone found a clip from an eight-year-old documentary in which he is heard to mutter that he “hates” Mackinac Island.** The nerve! They spread it to their hand-picked idiot media outlets, which is to say, Michigan Enjoyer and Facebook, and it spread from there.

No one seems to consider that others might feel the same way. I, too, am not fond of Mackinac. Let me sketch my experience with our famed resort island.

As a high-school sophomore, I and two girlfriends were visiting our friend Paul in the Les Cheneaux Islands, 11 miles away across the open water of Lake Huron. It was a three-week visit, and we were looking for things to do besides lounging on the lakeshore and smoking pot. Their boat was a 1941 wooden Chris Craft, roughly 20 feet or so, and it was stressed to us over and over that we could only take it out on “the big lake” if the weather conditions were perfect, flat calm. Plus we were all 16, 17 years old, not an age to make smart decisions. Paul’s mom vetoed the boat, so we drove to St. Ignace and took the ferry, aka the fudgie boat. I think we walked around downtown a little, then caught a departing ferry and returned to Cedarville. An unmemorable trip.

On subsequent trips, we arrived via private vessel. You can smell Mackinac’s distinctive odor, a mix of horse manure and fudge, before you get there. On these trips, we would go to the Pink Pony, one of a handful of infamous bars there. One thing about operating a boat drunk — while bad things can happen, and sometimes do, the fresh breeze in your face has a sobering, or at least awakening, effect. We never worried about Paul or his brother being drunk behind the wheel of that Chris Craft. Although on one trip, which I wasn’t on but heard about later, Paul was really overserved. He and our friend Jeff pulled out of the harbor and Paul drew a bead on some landmark in the far distance, then turned the wheel over to Jeff.

“Go straight to that mark, and do not deviate, no matter what,” he said, then went to the rear seat to lie down. Sometime later, Jeff called back, “Paul? I know you told me not to change course, but are we getting a little close to that freighter?” Ha ha ha. A 90-degree course change and another Mackinac story in the books.

Anyway, I’ve been to the island three times since then. Once to cover the end of the Port Huron-to-Mackinac sailing race for a book I was editing. Once to attend the Mackinac Policy Conference, the annual throwdown hosted by the Detroit Regional Chanber. And once with Kate and Alan because visiting Mackinac as a family is something every Michigan resident is required to do. I stayed in St. Ignace for the first trip, at some other hotel for the conference, and at Mission Point resort with the family. My takeaway from all visits: The food is bad almost everywhere, and everything from lodging to cheeseburgers is insanely overpriced. The place extracts the lint from your pockets before you leave.

There were some charming moments. Alan bought a kite for Kate, and they flew it from the wide front lawn of Mission Point. Every time a freighter passed by, happy hour prices prevailed for drinks. The place is pretty; supposedly lilac season there is wonderful, and once you get out of the hot, smelly downtown, it has the northern-Michigan charms of blue water, blue skies and low humidity. You can rent a bicycle and ride the 8-mile perimeter road, which is very pleasant.

The Grand Hotel is the place everyone talks about as the ne plus ultra of Mackinac, and it’s where the policy conference is held. If you can afford a starting in-season rate of $700 a night for a room, and don’t mind the dress code to visit the restaurants, and think “Somewhere in Time” is the most romantic movie ever made, well: It’s for you. If you can’t afford to stay there, and just want to amble down the famous porch, it will cost you $14, or $8 for kids. A one-time NN.c correspondent, Dave Bell, has, or had, a house there, on the bluff beyond the Grand. He said to tell the snoots at the gate that I was visiting the Bells, and they’d let me pass by free of charge. So I did. He wasn’t there, but the caretaker allowed me to wander the area and the barn. He bought a house that came with a horse and several absolutely lovely horse-drawn conveyances, including one made entirely of wicker. I don’t know if he’s still there; he dropped out of sight a while back.

The island runs on seasonal immigrant labor, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn this means pretty white European boys and girls in the customer-facing jobs, and Jamaicans everywhere else.

So that’s my Mackinac experience. I have had my fill of it, and if I never see or smell it again, that’s fine. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that anyone who had the typical hoi-polloi Mackinac experience didn’t care for it. You come north to get away from it all, not to dodge manure shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of tourists from Lansing.

** Finally, I should note that the exact quote was “I hate Mackinac,” and given that’s what a lot of people call the policy conference — “Are you going to Mackinac this year?” — it may well have been what he was talking about. But this is a silly, silly charge to make, and having already given it this many words, why go on?

Here’s a picture of Paul at one of our parties in the Les Cheneaux. RIP, old friend: