Travels With Hannah: Quisisana Offers Idyllic Slice Of Maine

You think you know what “all-inclusive” means.

And then you set foot into Quisisana.

I did receive an email beforehand warning me of one tiny inconvenience: There is no WiFi in the cabins on property in this idyllic slice of Maine.

Quisisana Resort, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, was originally two properties, the Sunset Inn and Quisisana, neighboring properties on Maine’s Lake Kezar, in the Lakes Region, which rubs up against New Hampshire’s region of the same name.

At any point on the serpentine drive up from Massachusetts, one can lose track. Am I in New Hampshire or Maine? There are subtle clues (license plates, stores selling fireworks — a New Hampshire delicacy).

In 1984, a young widow named Jane Orans purchased Quisisana, determined to retain its old school charm. No telephones or televisions in the cabins, which are truly cabins — pine-clad, with screened porches and instructions sent from staff prior to arrival: Bring your own shampoo. There is air conditioning and an impeccable view of the lake, and, in some models, working fireplaces.

My own cabin, Maestro, a recently renovated two-bedroom that sat perched over the water, enjoyed a 180-degree view of the water and a brick fireplace. On a chilly Tuesday afternoon, a cabin boy who doubled as a French provocateur in the Fourth of July performance of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” arrived to light a blazing, perfect Maine fire in my room.

There is, at Quisisana, an air of curated formality. Meals, included in the weekly price, are taken in the dining room, and guests are assigned the same table for the entire week. (The exception is lunch, which guests are welcome to eat at Café Kezar in kind weather, a grab-and-go venue that forgoes the formality of a sit-down meal.) Every morning, a paper menu arrives with selections for lunch and dinner, and guests circle their choices.

The oft-repeated adage at Quisisana is “in the pines,” and it is apt. Towering white pine trees overlook the entire property, and hidden trails are blanketed with needles. In one grove or another you might find wild rhododendron — the blooms, current owner Sam Orans asserts, occur before guests arrive, in the preseason — blueberry bushes with tiny Maine blueberries, or raspberries. Imagine August’s delight.

One foot upon the needled earth evoked for me instant nostalgia; was this a resort for the well-heeled, or a trip down memory lane back to Camp Kippewa for Girls, where I spent multiple consecutive summers in the 1990s, and where my mind and body have been aching for return, ever since I left?

Perhaps that’s one reason why generations come back here in droves. Draped on the beach, a multi-generational fold: grandparents, their children, and their children, on floats, in boats, paddling out into the lake’s ink-black center.

At Quisisana, guests stay for a week, for the most part. There are some exceptions made, based on availability. (The swinging pendulum of COVID has made predicting arrival and departure less reliable, and the property is vigilant about vaccination and testing; guests must present tests upon arrival, and also must test for the first three days of their stay.)

During the summer of 2020, the Orans — Jane’s son, Sam, and his wife, Nathalie, who now run the property — and Quisisana adopted a pod mentality, inviting two 40-person groups of guests for one-month sessions in an adapted version of its operation. Some of the changes made during that season, including the addition of an open-air theater space called the Shed and an outdoor bar, are now used for regular-season guests.

The theater lies at the heart of this respite on Lake Kezar, a place so cherished that it is rumored that Stephen King purchased extra lots of land around its perimeter in the interest of curbing development. Each week, the staff performs nine shows: one short welcome show, two full-length musicals, one matinée musical designed for children, one children’s opera (also a matinée), three musical concerts, and one revue.

Our dining room servers, Pace University graduate Sean-Michael Bruno and University of Wisconsin Stevens Point graduate Colin Sullivan, played, respectively, the donkey and Lord Farquaad in “Shrek,” much to my children’s delight. At each meal following the Wednesday matinee, they screamed, “There’s the donkey!” each time Sean returned to check on the progress of our meal.

They placed the 6-foot-6-inch Colin less ably, but, as he had donned a wig and a costume that made his long legs appear half their size, they may not have recognized him as the diminutive lord from the musical, even if he was the one of the stars of our meals.

In the evenings, we were invited to drop our children off a half hour before the dinner bell — more of a chime, really, a gong rung by two members of the dining staff at the top of the stairs leading to the dining room at 6:30 p.m., denoting that the meal was ready to begin. Children could eat without us, though, at our assigned tables some nights, or at group tables, herded together and minded by the staff’s babysitting team.

For seven nights, we had no idea what they ate for dinner, if they had a single vegetable, or if they rushed directly to dessert without stopping. And we didn’t care.

Before we made it into the dining room, the tiny people who often couldn’t sit through a relaxing meal were shuffled off to Treble Hall (a room overflowing with child care providers and toys) with a group of like-minded children, or to search for blueberries on the trails, or to play on the sand before a drooping sun.

Then we could scoop them up after we had eaten, say, Executive Chef Andrew Vogel’s perfectly tender saddle of lamb beneath a glossy, mint-inflected demi-glace, or, on one particular night, a soft-shelled Maine lobster, served with butter and sugar corn, and a cone of homemade truffled French fries.

One glassy morning, toward week’s end, I decided to see if my muscle memory was intact and went out on a boat with water skis and ambition. My goal was to return to my slalom days of glory at Kippewa — but my body had other plans. I ate mouthfuls of water twice before asking for a second ski, and then popped up, like a kernel of corn in hot oil. Outside of the wake, the lake was easy to cut, and I rode it for just a minute, before letting the rope go. There’s no sense in tempting fate.

But then, at Quisisana, there’s no need to. As a roiling, fiery sunset betrayed on our final night, fate is all around us. It brings us where we need to be.

It brought me to Quisisana.

quisisanaresort.com

From $470 per night. Call for reservations: (207) 925-3500.