I FIRST HEARD of the hotel Basin Harbor from my neighbor, a man so resolutely traditional I believe I once saw him wearing a sport coat while clipping flowers in his garden. “You’ll love it. It’s like the resort in ‘Dirty Dancing,’” he said when I told him I was seeking a hotel on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain. “There is a ton to do,” he added by way of explanation.

I grew up in Connecticut and I know the relentless socializing and activity pursuit that blue-blood culture can entail—golf at dawn, lunch in the clubhouse, afternoon flower arranging for the ladies and mandatory cocktail hour. This need to grind through a day with activities, born perhaps of the Protestant work ethic, always put me off. It seemed designed to keep intimacy at bay as well as reflection.

But after the past year of up-and-down Covid, I have had more intimate conversations with my husband and two children than I care to count. I have read, I have pondered. I am confident my 48-year-old soul runs deep. Maybe it’s time I took a watercolor class with some old biddies, tried out canoeing and got sloshed in the rec hall at bingo night. Suddenly the idea of talking to strangers didn’t seem so bad.

The Red Mill restaurant is housed in a former sawmill, which processed the lumber from Basin Harbor’s trees from the 1930s to the late ’60s, used for the cottages and furniture. In 1972, it was converted into a staff restaurant that served only beer, popcorn and hot dogs. Now guests and the stray pilot—the restaurant sits beside a small airfield—can eat there too.

Photo: Kelly Burgess for The Wall Street Journal

We booked a two-bedroom lakeside cabin at Basin Harbor for four days in June (for around $900 a night; standard rooms start at $300). In truth, I had modest expectations. The resort has been around since 1886 and I have been to enough summer compounds in Maine to know what New Englanders think about luxury or even new carpets. “There won’t be air conditioning,” I told my pampered family.

When our car approached Basin Harbor, just outside Vergennes in western Vermont, farmland quickly gave way to the small bay that fronts the resort. We stopped quite suddenly. We stood gaping at a deep-blue lake of considerable size throwing up surf, high tumultuous clouds and the Adirondacks rolling in purple haze. “Good lord,” my husband said. “It’s as beautiful as Como.”

Pennie Beach and her brother Bob in front of the golf course that their grandfather Allen Penfield Beach built starting in 1927.

Photo: Kelly Burgess for The Wall Street Journal

Pennie Beach and her brother run Basin Harbor as have three generations of Beaches behind them. She finds the analogy to Italian glacial lakes apt and funny. “Como,” she scoffed. “I visited Como and I saw a man with a golden retriever in a boat and thought ‘Yep, I get it. I have seen this before.’” Pennie’s brother Robert can often be seen zipping around Basin Harbor in a golf cart with two golden retrievers hanging out in the back seat. Dogs are big at Basin Harbor.

On my second day, Pennie and I sat in the resort’s rather worn-down main house as night came on, looking out at the lake over very generous glasses of white wine. It had been one of those days where I did too much—water-skied, biked to Button Bay State Park (just beside the resort), swam in the pool, played a bit of badminton. Covid and all its effects seemed very far away—one of the benefits Vermont offers as a state with low rates of transmission and high rates of vaccination.

At lunch we’d eaten at one of the resort’s restaurants, the Red Mill, a place set right next to a grass airfield where four-seater airplanes landed just a few yards from us. One pilot, Carl Facer, who flew in from Lake Placid for lunch, let my kids sit in the cockpit and assured my 13-year-old he could get his license when he was 16. “You just need to start saving now if you want to start on time,” Mr. Facer told my son, man to man.

After a day this action packed, getting through cocktail hour seemed a stretch, but Pennie and all the Beaches are easy company. What the resort lacks in luxury, the owners make up for with familiarity and dry Yankee charm. Pennie filled me in on the challenges of running a resort in the time of Covid. How staff is short and tight margins even tighter. Next to us two couples, still in their tennis whites, discussed whether someone named Meg was ever really going to get a handle on bridge. We watched kids from an in-progress wedding roll down a hill in their dress clothes. A bald eagle cut toward the water in a hunting arc. Pennie talked about the resort’s history as a farm. “We don’t want to be trendy and keep up with people,” she said, noting that the cottages don’t have TV and the resort lacks a spa, though it does offer air-conditioning and installed Wi-Fi in 2004. “When got Wi-Fi…that was huge.”

People come here to spend time with their families and to relive their childhood summers—to do the things they did as children with their own children. Wally Stimpson, a retired Naples, Fla., resident whose father invented the Stimpmeter, which gauges how fast a golf ball will roll on the green, has been coming to Basin Harbor with his extended family the same week every summer for 25 years.

“This place is an anchor for our family,” said Mr. Stimpson, adding that he had 27 family members on campus that week. “The fact we can all occupy different cabins is crucial.”

Guests at Basin Harbor can rent a powerboat and explore Lake Champlain on their own.

Photo: Kelly Burgess for The Wall Street Journal

Each year, before her guests leave, Pennie encourages them to reserve cottages for next year. Competition can be fierce and families are loath to skip a year and lose their spot. It’s a rare thing at Basin Harbor to have new blood such as ours in the prime cottages in summer. Covid, and the fact we came relatively early in the season, gave our family an unexpected opportunity to see the place.

Sean McInerney, a school psychologist from Westchester, N.Y., has been coming to Basin Harbor every year for 37 years, save three when his children were born. His extended family rents cabins in August and he remembers when the teenagers that ran the kids’ camp would take him and his cousins across the lake to jump off 20-foot cliffs. In this youth, the dining room was jacket-and-tie and the children had free run of the place until dinnertime. “You are paying for the nostalgia,” he said. “When I drive up here I smell the manure coming off the farms and I am like, ‘I’m here.’”

Mr. McInerney takes his three small children to Button Bay State Park where they swim out to a deserted island. In the evening he throws himself into group activities like bingo. “Oh, you have to do it,” he enthused. “In the time before Covid, there could be 200 people playing bingo together.”

The night I went, perhaps 30 people showed up for the 9 p.m. round. Big families settled in at the long tables, shuffling their bingo cards. The hall filled and more tables were needed. A guest opened a door and started hauling out tables and setting up chairs. One woman from Philadelphia looked at me, smiled and pointed to my beer. “Smart girl,” she said with a mid-Atlantic twang. “Where did you get that? We need to set up a bar in here.” She left to hunt down a card table and possibly some liquor. Bingo!

SHORE BETS

Taking in the sights and scenery around Lake Champlain

Church Street in Burlington, Vt., about an hour’s drive north of Basin Harbor.

Photo: Getty Images

The eastern shore of Lake Champlain is anchored by Burlington, a college town situated right on the shores of the lake and famous for its funky shops, good restaurants and cozy breweries. Around Burlington little towns and farms exist peacefully with antique shops and museums that celebrate Champlain’s history as an American waterway and artist inspiration. Here, a few key stops in the region.

Sitting on 45 acres of property, Shelburne Museum pays homage to New England history and traditions. Visitors can wander the many gardens, check out the fully intact sidewheel steamboat or the other carefully preserved historical buildings. The museum punches above its weight with pieces by Claude Monet as well as American favorites Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer and Grandma Moses. (Open June 2 - Oct. 17, Wed-Sun 10 A.M. - 4 P.M.)

For visitors with small children,Shelburne Farms is five minutes down the road. There, kids can see a working farm in progress and say hello to the many draft horses and Nubian goats who live there.

The small city of Vergennes, just outside Basin Harbor, is the place to go if you need a change of pace or a little light shopping. It is small, with only a couple of intersecting streets, but lovingly restored to its 19th-century mill-town beauty. The main street is lined with wine stores, galleries with local art and restaurants. Check out the Black Sheep Bistro for an early dinner. The duck rillette is particularly good (253 Main St., blacksheepbistrovt.com).

Burlington, the state’s most populous city, lies about an hour north of Basin Harbor. Home to both the University of Vermont and Champlain College, the city has hustle and vibe year-round. In the summer, bike the nearly 8 miles of waterfront or take one of the many ferries across Lake Champlain to the New York side. In the winter or autumn, wander the Church Street marketplace and swing by Lake Champlain Chocolate.

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