The tasting room with a fire going. The bookstore that doesn't mind if you stay two hours. The museum nobody on TripAdvisor mentions. Rain on a lake is one of the better problems to have.
Two 18-hole mini-golf courses, go-kart tracks, bumper cars and bumper boats, batting cages, a haunted mansion, and an arcade — open daily, 10am to 9pm, year-round. It's the answer on a day the lake gets too windy for the boat or the afternoon runs too hot for another hour of sun. Kids run the show here; budget the afternoon accordingly.
Opened in June 1926 as Johnson's Rustic Dance Palace — a 90-by-100-foot floor that hosted Big Band-era dancers before the building turned into a summer stock theater and, later, the anchor of the Houghton Lake Historical Village. Village Days run Fridays and Saturdays in summer, noon to 4, with pioneer-craft demonstrations and a storyteller. Tours by reservation through the Houghton Lake Area Historical Society.