Located in the Great Lakes region of the Midwestern United States, Michigan consist of two peninsulas: the Lower Peninsula (to which the name Michigan was originally applied), and the Upper Peninsula, separated by the Straits of Mackinac, a 8km channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, over which spans the Mackinac Bridge, opened in 1957. The state has the longest freshwater coastline of any political subdivision in the world, being bounded by four of the five Great Lakes, plus Lake Saint Clair, on which are numerous large islands. As a result, it has more lighthouses (about 150) than any other state. It also has 64,980 inland lakes and ponds, and a person in the state is never more than 10km from a natural water source. In fact the name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake".
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