Discover Utica

Utica offers several distinct ways to plan a stay: parks with sports and picnic facilities, access to the Clinton River, trail connections, a wildlife experience, and baseball. If you’re looking for a hotel in Utica, it may help to first consider which of these themes matter for your trip.

Parks, Sports, and Festival

Grant Park brings together a variety of activities: tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts, playgrounds, picnic pavilions, and an internal walking path with benches. When planning, you can consider whether sports facilities, play, picnicking, or a walk along the internal path best matches your interests. The path with benches offers a different focus from the courts or pavilions. The 2017 master plan described the Old Mill Arts and Crafts Festival in Grant Park as an annual summer event. The festival adds a cultural occasion to the park’s offerings. Check the current dates before your trip if you’d like to plan your stay around it.

River Access and Trail Connections

Heritage Park offers direct access to the Clinton River and has a kayak and canoe launch. It is also an important connecting section of the Lake St. Clair to Stony Creek Trail. At Heritage Park, you can consider direct river access, the kayak and canoe launch, and the trail connection as distinct aspects of your plans. This makes it possible to distinguish whether water access, a launch, or the trail connection matters most to you.

The Utica Connector Trail is a 1.28-mile paved connection to River Bends Park. Depending on whether trail length and surface or a park’s direct water access matter more to you, you’ll have different criteria to consider.

Other Places and Experiences

Part of the Utica Recreation Area has been developed as a dog park. The dog park is therefore one area within the Recreation Area, not the entire site. Jacqueline K. Noonan River Walk Park is next to the community’s public library. This nearby landmark offers a specific point of reference when locating the park in your plans.

For animal experiences, there’s LegaSea Aquarium & The Reptarium, a 30,000-square-foot facility in Utica. Aquarium and reptile experiences are its two named areas of focus. If you’d like to include an animal experience in your travel plans, this combination is the key thematic difference from parks and trail connections.

The USPBL baseball stadium in downtown Utica is called UWM Field. Since opening day on May 30, 2016, it has hosted games by college, high school, youth, and adult teams, as well as tournaments. If a game is the reason for your trip, check the schedule in advance.

Discover more destinations: St Clair Shores, Fraser, Harrison Township, Warren, Clinton Township, Mount Clemens, Roseville, Sterling Heights.

For the broader travel overview: Macomb.