by Jim Whitehouse
My beloved wife Marsha and I took a little trip up north to see friends and ride our bicycles along the Lake Michigan shoreline.
We stayed in an old summer resort hotel. It was great.
These old structures used to be everywhere in Michigan, back when people couldn’t afford cottages and cabins and such. Without doubt, the most famous of these is Mackinac Island’s luxurious, if crooked and creaky, Grand Hotel.
We’ve stayed in a few, including The Grand, which opened in 1887 and took only 93 days to build.
The old summer resorts were originally not particularly fancy. They were simple wood-framed, wood-clad, wood-floored buildings with very little plumbing, no heat, no air conditioning, and no electricity.
The one we just stayed in has changed very little, but for modernization of the utilities.
I went to the front desk to check in.
“Do you by any chance have a secure place where we can store our bicycles?” I asked the nice lady.
“Sure,” she said, pointing to the far end of the lobby. There, stacked around the walls, between big leather chairs and in front of a big fireplace were several bicycles.
“This is my kind of place!” I said.
Twenty minutes later, as I made my fourth trip up three floors on the slightly tilted squeaky staircase, lugging suitcases and a cooler with the last of our garden’s cherry tomatoes, I was having second thoughts about the 19th century’s lack of elevators, but my angst soon passed. We had a lovely stay.
The building reminded me of my lifelong summertime home-away-from home, a little boating club housed in a similar old resort hotel. There, I learned to swim and race sailboats. Members can rent the former hotel rooms by the season, so since our family started going there when I was 6-years-old, I’ve spent many a night in the creaky old building on the lake.
But without doubt, the most memorable of the summer resort hotels we’ve experienced was just north of the Indiana border on the shore of Lake Michigan. Marsha and I took our very young children there to participate in a big, organized bike ride. Jill, age 3, would ride on a carrier on the back of my bike, but TJ, then age 5, would ride on his very own little red bike with solid rubber tires, having just abandoned training wheels.
Because thousands of cyclists would participate in the ride, lodging was hard to come by. I was delighted to discover an artist’s colony that occupied one of the rambling old resort hotels. It was opening its rooms to cyclists for the weekend, the artists who owned the place moving out into tents in favor of making some money from the riders.
The communal bathroom was down the hall. Maintenance was something the artists who lived there only whispered about as they painted their canvases but not the building. If the rooms even had locks, there were no keys. It was a wonderful experience.
The only issue we had with it was that the single light bulb hanging in the center of our room was burned out.
Even though rule-keeping Marsha objected, I quietly slipped into the room next door and stole the lightbulb hanging there so we could get settled. Then, we went out for dinner.
When we returned, the bulb was gone. I had to check 3 other rooms before I found one that worked. I stole it.
We used the community bathroom, having to first go into a neighboring room to steal another lightbulb. When we returned to our room, our bulb was gone. No problem. We were ready to sleep anyway. One big hotel, 3 bulbs.
Elevators and light bulbs. These are small sacrifices for a great experience.
