I'm planning a trip to the Upper Peninsula in about a month, so I've
begun looking at charts. We'll be landing at Marquette, Escanaba,
Menominee, and Houghton. Or that's the plan anyway.

Marquette/Sawyer KSAW has one runway, 2 1/2 miles long x 150' pointed
1/19. Now the collective wisdom of airport designers in this part of
the country is that, if you have only one runway, you do it like 14/32
or 12/34. But I have to believe that whoever committed to 2 1/2 miles
of concrete -- out in the woods where he could have pointed it wherever
he wanted -- must have looked at prevailing winds. So are the winds
different because of the lake? I don't particularly want to divert from
there just because my little PA-28 can't handle a crosswind, although
there are several easy places to go.

SAW was - at least when I was going to school in Marquette in the '70's - a
B-52 base. (Those guys partied like college kids!) Don't BUFFs have that funky
castoring crosswind landing gear? If I recall, the wind was usually out of the
north. I just flew over there on the way to Houghton a couple of months back
and saw several GA planes on the ground. NWA flies in and out of there
regularly - I don't think you'll have too much trouble.