By Everett Potter

For decades, I’ve spent at least a part of my summers on a lake in Western Maine. It’s an environment that I’ve come to love and cherish, from the early morning cries of a loon to the warm swimming waters and the smell of pine trees. So when I had a chance to spend a night at Migis Lodge, about half an hour from where I get away in the summer, I jumped at the chance.

Migis is considered the last of a breed, an American-plan lodge where traditions rule, and I was curious to experience it. For more than a century, it has offered a classic Maine vacation experience.

My wife and I drove down a long dirt road in South Casco through stands of tall white pines until we came to a cluster of buildings and “walls” of stacked logs, a signature look of the resort. Migis Lodge sits on 125 forested acres and has 3,500 feet of undulating wooded shoreline on Sebago Lake, Maine’s second largest lake at 14 miles long. Built in 1916 as a men’s-only fishing camp called National Camps, it has long since welcomed couples and solo travelers to experience a classic lakeside vacation. In the 1980s, kids were invited to stay and now it looms large as a family retreat. It was renamed Migis (My’ gus) in 1924 for an Abenaki Indian word for “the place to steal away to rest.”

 Continue reading …