Ellis Lake Resort

Ellis Lake Resort

By: Lia Butler

            “Why didn’t I choose to go with my dad?” I thought to myself as my brother, Tommy, rants on about something I lost interest in a long time ago. I mean, my dad got everyone a coke for driving with him but I chose to go with Tommy because I made the mistake of choosing to go in my dad’s car before I noticed my mom’s glare from inside Tommy’s car. Tommy’s a very cautious driver and if the speed limit is 50 mph, he’ll go 50 mph. So of course we got to Ellis Lake Resort, near Interlochen, Michigan, a while after my dad and brother arrived. The reason we were going to Ellis Lake was because it was my grandma’s 80^th birthday and all my relatives would spend the weekend there to celebrate the special occasion.

            I have a big family. My dad has four brothers and five sisters and all of them were able to be there so it made for quite a memorable time! At night, I slept in my family’s cabin. My mom and I shared a bed, two of my brothers shared a bed, Tommy slept on the couch, and my dad slept on an air mattress.

            Ellis Lake was awesome! It could be from all the cozy cabins that each has their own name, like “Fern, Oak, and Birch”, or it could be because my whole family was there that weekend and we practically rented out the whole place. The entire weekend my “posse” and I, as my relatives soon decided to call Paige, Rachel, Tory, and I, ran around going canoeing, playing volleyball, Frisbee, or swimming.  

            Everyone agreed that we should do this weekend retreat more often because we all had a good time. Besides the bugs there, which were easily forgotten about with a little bug spray, or the supposed ghosts in certain cabins, there was nothing to worry about. Another thing that sort of stank, literally, was that the bathrooms didn’t have a ceiling separating the living room from it so if someone was using it, we basically cleared out of the cabin and found something to do outside.

At Ellis Lake, they have journals in each cabin that past visitors wrote in, telling how they enjoyed their visit, or about the ghost in the cabin that would sing along with the radio (which my brother, Joey, tested and claimed, that indeed, he heard a high pitched voice in the background of the music)!

One night, my cousin and I enjoyed dramatically interpreting our visit into the journal in the hopes of future visitors enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it. Also, in a lot of the journals, the past visitors hid pennies inside the cabin and they would write down clues for the next visitor to figure them out and find them. Unfortunately, there were no recent journal entries concerning pennies for us to find.

            A weekend is way too short to spend at Ellis Lake. We hardly had time to celebrate! I loved it so much and it definitely was mostly due to all of my family being there. I love my aunts and uncles; they are some of the funniest people ever. My cousins and I always found something to do so we were never bored. What I learned was that I like spending time with my family the most. I feel really comfortable and am always happy around them. And I suppose I didn’t mind the drive there so much because guess who I drove with on the way home!