04/14/2026
It's been a hot minute since we sold the Lodge in 2013. I had expected to get to this project after a couple years and here I find myself a decade late! But here it is, anyway!
Our summer business at the Lodge consisted of band camps, sports camps, and family groups. Many of these groups were annual customers and we got to know them pretty well. The family reunions were not annual, but we interacted with them so closely that by the end of their stay, we frequently felt like adopted family members☺️Many of these groups shared T-shirts commemorating their stays. We happily wore them! When we sold the Lodge, I knew we would not wear all of them very often--there were so many!--so I stashed a collection in a box, planning to make a quilt later. Little did I know how long it would take for life to get to the point where I finally got to it!
The shirts had been in a box for so long that they were creased from folding. I washed them to freshen everything up and found I had 2 full front loading washer loads of shirts! I ended up with two quilts instead of one! Wow! And they're perfect for the bunk beds Nick selected for our grandsons (6 of them now, and not a girl in the bunch!).
Oh, the memories! I'll describe a few of them here. If you don't find your group listed, please don't be offended! We appreciated all of our guests.
Well, actually there was one guest we did not appreciate. Greg Thompson brought Far Post Soccer to the Lodge many times. We mostly housed the coaches, as they gave clinics in Boyne City and Petoskey, and really helped grow the soccer communities in the north. One time Greg's coaches had a very smelly room. We searched and found some super smelly shoes, and removed them from the room. Didn't solve the problem. We tore the beds apart, looked under everything, cleaned thoroughly. No improvement. The smell seemed to be concentrated in the bathroom. If you recall the bathrooms, they were very small and basic--very little room for a source of a bad smell. After the coaches left, we did one final review of the room, with special attention to the bathroom. We found a mischievous child (previous guest) had brought back some clams from the lake and left them in the light fixture; every time the light was on, it would get hot and just bake those clams. YUCK!
Grand Haven HS Band was one of our longstanding bands. We had at least 20 years worth of T-shirts from GHHS. Lots of great music from this hard-working group. We got a kick out of how much they loved our nacho lunch on Fridays. The kids would be in the middle of rehearsal up on the field and randomly some kid would yell out something like, "90 minutes to nachos!" and everyone would cheer. One year I had fun with this and I put hotdogs on the menu for Friday, fully knowing I would get grief about it all week. That Friday when the percussion came in (they always ate first), they were SO thrilled that we were actually serving nachos! It was good to have some fun with this, especially because GHHS was so large that we were extra tired by the end of the week:)
Leslie HS Band was another of our regular bands, not as large as GHHS. They did a Pirates of the Caribbean show in the year that we had 3 bands with that theme. We loved hearing the music all week, but 3 weeks with the same tunes was a bit much! One of the Leslie chaperones was a piano teacher and when she found out our daughter Lindsay wanted to learn to play, she bought some books and worked with her every day. How cool was that! And I met fellow quilter Beth Murphy and we still quilt together.
Vicksburg HS Band, aka The Big Red Machine, came to the Lodge for a few years. That's my alma mater and I was happy to host and reconnect with some former schoolmates who had kids in the band.
We also hosted many sports teams, including football, soccer, and XC runners. These teams were smaller, so we often had more than one team in house at the same time. With their cooperation, everything seemed to work fine, at least from our perspective. Of course, there was the year when the runners decided to prank the footballers. They would do sneaky little things like tie the footballers shoestrings together, or move them around so they had to search for them--nothing actually harmful. This went on for a few days, with the football coaches telling their boys to be the bigger men (they were, literally!) and ignore the skinny runners. That worked fine until the last day, when the football coaches gave permission to the boys to retaliate. The football players mainly wanted to throw the runners into the pool and several succeeded. But there was the one runner who decided to run; the football guy chasing him was faster than he expected, so instead of letting himself get caught, he climbed a tree; but he didn't pick a big enough tree and next thing he knew, two guys were rocking his tree back and forth! If I recall correctly, he climbed down and took his medicine before he was flung out of the tree.
We worked with lots of great coaches. Tim Hobson and Laurens Tenkate from Clio and Iliana brought runners all the way from California for camp in the relative cool of Northern Michigan. Tom Gass and Dan Roggenbaum from Vandercook Lake let me run with them when I was training for 3rd degree black belt. I even did the 7 Hills run, which was their finale. Traverse City came up with Gavin Richmond and other coaches. TC is Nick's hometown, so he enjoyed chatting with the kids and their parents.
I even included a couple of Boyne City shirts, in honor of the XC running meet we hosted for many years. BCHS does not have a home course, so we were their home while we ran the Lodge.
And there were the wonderful family groups! We sang around the campfire with the Marino and Collins families. We decorated shirts and did crafts. We celebrated happy events and honored sad ones. And we always knew that a weekend with a family reunion was going to be fun for us because only the really nice families have reunions--the cranky, dysfunctional ones don't! The pink T on the back of the larger quilt is from the Dexter family. I couldn't cut a rectangle from it without losing a whole bunch of signatures, so I put the entire shirt on the quilt.
The golden yellow signatures on each quilt are from our annual band bash. Our regular New Years Eve band used to take over the Lodge for 24 hours each summer and have a major jam session. Anywhere from 3 to a dozen or more musicians would play together. We squeezed them in between summer groups and we would try to catch some rest.
I'll stop here. If you feel like adding a memory, please do! We'd love to hear about what you remember from your time at the Lodge.
