"Screen Door" Vacations: Fall Destinations With Simple, Nostalgic Charms
(Photo: Indiana Stan/Flickr)
The sound of a screen door banging shut is the jaunty sound of summer or early fall. Of a camp cabin, a motel on a lake, a hut on a tropical beach. This is a portal to that place where you’re always in an old pair of cutoffs, where there is no vestige of your “real” life. A proper “screen door” kind of place is comfy but never luxe — and never, ever retro.
Many of my favorite screen doors — in Montana and Maine — lead into rooms that have no phones, no TV, no Wi-Fi. Better to play Monopoly by the fire than go for your laptop.
Maybe this is all nostalgia for a time when I was a toddler at a bungalow colony called the Homowack Lodge in New York’s Catskill Mountains. When my mother would say to me, “Don’t bang the door, darling,” even though she didn’t really care. My pop would commute in from the city. The uncles would be on the lawn playing gin rummy. All of it gone now.
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Breakfast at the Screen Door, Portland. (Photo: Bree Jad/Flickr)
Still, there are other screen doors that call out to me. In Portland, Oregon, there is a restaurant called Screen Door, where they serve down-home fried chicken. Clifton, Texas, has the Screen Door Inn, where the original screen doors from the early-20th-century building have been refurbished and attached to each room.
Rooms at the Screen Door Inn come with this one expected accoutrement (Photo: Screen Door Inn)
The true screen door to my heart is at Chico Hot Springs Resort & Day Spa in Montana. This is a wonderful resort that includes the 100-year-old original lodge, as well as cabins and cottages spread out on a lush hillside overlooking the aptly named Paradise Valley. The region is gorgeous in the fall, and the air’s as fresh and cool as a martini at the resort’s Chico Saloon. Next to the bar is a swimming pool that sits over the hot springs where, once upon a time, cowboys stood around in the warm water, hats on, drinking as they soaked their weary limbs. If you’re willing to share a bathroom, you can get a room for $59 and then plunder the hotel’s fabulous wine list and dine on duck or prime rib. If you want to splurge, a deeply comfy cabin on the “North Forty” has a huge bathroom and a porch where you can watch the season change (around $235).
The pool at Chico Hot Springs, Montana (Photo: Jason Holmberg/Flickr)
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Montana folks like to get away come winter, though, and for this, there’s Wright by the Sea in Delray Beach, Florida — my favorite sun spot — or Tropical Winds Motel & Cottages, in Sanibel, Florida, where your cottage with its screened-in porch is literally on the beach.
Screened-in porches that face the beach are part of the charm at Tropical Winds. (Photo: Facebook/Tropical Winds)
The leaves change early in northern Maine, so I’ll be heading up to the town of Rangeley to the 90-year-old Country Club Inn (which has been run by the same family since 1975). The restaurant and bar overlook a huge vista, lakes, trees, and the village of Rangeley itself. The food and drinks are simple and good. You can fish, hunt, ski, go kayaking, play some golf, and find a few antiques in town. You can drive a few miles north toward the Canadian border and find some real wilderness (beware the moose and bears). And this is real value: rates from $139, depending on the season.
Country Club Inn, Rangeley Maine (Photo: Country Club Inn/Facebook)
Wisconsin has a lot of old-fashioned screen-door kinds of places. And when I spot Camp Wandawega, I’m in heaven. Near Elkhorn, it’s a couple of hours’ drive from Chicago but a world apart — a place as old-fashioned as my cabin in the Catskills back in the day. There are cabins on a lake, communal showers, iron bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. This is your past calling, it seems to say to me. Camp Wandawega promises its guests that they will be immersing themselves in a “zero-frills, old-school summer camp experience.”
No frills (except for the occasional screen door) at Camp Wandawega, Wisconsin (Flickr/Jodimichelle)
The notion of such rustic accommodations may seem off-putting to some people used to the five-star hotel experience. But whether you’re seeking a new adventure or a return to the travel memories of your past, the screen door of the imagination should always remain open.
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