Photography By Kirsten Beckerman
When a city girl goes to the country, she wants to see Nature. And as my husband and I drove through St. Michaels, past turkey vultures holding court on someone’s lawn, down Wades Point Road where chickens pecked at gravel, to the white brick inn surrounded by the Bay, my anticipation of a country getaway grew. Turns out I wasn’t disappointed; Wades Point Inn is a rural retreat where it’s easy to be distracted by the natural world.
Really easy—because when you enter the inn, you leave technology behind. Though high on charm, rooms are free of televisions, telephones, radios, even clocks. No newspapers either. “All those things are here,” Betsy Feiler, the innkeeper, explains, “but just not in the rooms. We’re so tuned in to walking into a room and turning on the television. Here we help people tune out so that they can read or relax or talk to each other.”
Feiler and her late husband bought the inn in 1984. “I had reached a crisis,” she says, “and I went out to the top of the hill behind my house and stood on my tiptoes and said, ‘God, do whatever you want with me.’”
“He could have sent me to Africa,” she says with a laugh, but instead Feiler, her husband, and children, left Brewster, New York, to come to the Eastern Shore, much closer to the Washington, D.C., area where she was raised. Moving to Wades Point, which had been an inn since 1890, she says, was “like coming home again.” Feiler’s deep faith shows up in little details in the inn like Christian-themed books mixed in with secular titles in the library or a framed copy of “Footprints” in a room.
After checking in, Barbara Reisert, the inn’s general manager, showed us through the Main House—a three storied, white brick building with screened front and back porches and well-tended hedges—built circa 1819 for Thomas Kemp, designer of Baltimore clipper ships. She pointed out the small kitchen alcove where guests can borrow a corkscrew or grab ice. We admired oriental carpets in the foyer and a forty-six star flag hanging over the living room mantel, as well as one of three guesthouses on the property.
Wades Point Inn offers several types of rooms. We stayed in the Sunset Room on the third floor of the Main House. The room, like the others on this floor, was recently renovated, full of light, and decorated simply: pale butter-colored walls, a metal frame full-size bed with a handmade quilt (just one of many quilts in the inn made by a friend of Feiler’s, a touch she describes as “like a little bit of love in each room"). The wide- planked wooden floors are graced with petite throw rugs. Two small watercolors hang on the walls, and two large windows provide breathtaking views of the Bay. (The inn installs window air conditioning units in the rooms during summer.) Without a closet to take up space, the room felt spacious, and the bathroom, easily as large as the bedroom, also had large windows and a clawfoot bathtub with shower hook-up.
On the second floor of the Main House, rooms in the Victorian Summer Wing are smaller, and their bathrooms, though private, have showers and are a short walk down the hallway. All of the Main House rooms have sinks in the bedrooms and signs in the bathrooms reminding guests that this is “country plumbing.”
The signs posted at the Mildred T. Kemp House, a two-story guesthouse named for a former owner of Wades Point, warn against entertaining local farm cats in your room: “They may try to fool you into thinking they’re allowed, but don’t fall for it!” Guests must be paying attention because the rooms are spotless and pet-free. A recent addition to the property, this modern guesthouse still manages to blend in with the other historic buildings with its white-shingled siding and green shutters, and rooms follow the country theme set in the Main House: quilts, flowered curtains, grapevine wreaths on walls. Bathrooms are standard hotel style softened by cloth shower curtains. Some units have well-stocked kitchenettes; nearly all have the perk of private balconies or porches facing the water.
The small white Farmhouse, which sits just off the circular drive in front of the Main House, is clearly the most rustic of the three buildings. The screen door sticks, the staircase is narrow, the floors slope. Like the old-fashioned home of a favorite country aunt, the house has three snug bedrooms, some with a rocking chair and two or three beds clothed in quilts or candlewick bedspreads (the Web site claims the house will sleep up to fourteen), painted wood floors with braided rugs, and tiny no-frills bathrooms. It is a bargain, though, if you decide to rent the entire house, as had a group of students attending a family reunion at the inn this weekend.
Afterwards, we tackled the one-mile nature trail that runs through the property (the inn sits on 120 acres of fields and woodland). A map advises guests to “keep your eyes open for” wildlife, including Chessie, the Bay’s “monster.” I had hoped to see a great blue heron, and Barbara mentioned we might see an eagle. No such luck. But near the pond, my husband saw a doe, and I spied a pair of swans trailed by their cygnets. Walking past the swimming pier, we chatted with a couple lounging in Adirondack chairs and waved to folks watching the Bay from the inn’s screened porch.
Then, after a hit and miss dinner at The Chesapeake Landing, a local no-frills restaurant, which Barbara had recommended as a place “the locals go and go back to,” we fell asleep easily, listening to the waves.
Friday morning brought rain and a modest breakfast of muffins, coffee, juice, and scrambled eggs. Unlike a bed & breakfast, where guests share a single breakfast table, the expansive, light-filled breakfast room at Wades Point Inn has many white wicker tables that seat up to four, so guests who need a good dose of caffeine before talking to strangers can rest easy. One wall of the room is made up of windows that look out onto the Bay, and the staff has thoughtfully provided binoculars and a bird field guide for guests’ pleasure.
After breakfast, we said goodbye and headed back down Wades Point Road. I was still hoping to see a heron, when I turned toward the pond and there one was, fishing in the rain-dappled water. I yelled to my husband to stop the car. I ran through the wet grass only to see it hesitate and gracefully lift off into the air. I could only shrug my shoulders; for each of us, the time had come to leave the sanctuary of Wades Point.
Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.
Wades Point Inn on the Bay
Wades Point Rd., St. Michaels, Md. 410-745-2500 or http://www.wadespoint.com
Rates: Main House: Victorian Summer Wing, $140-$170. Tree Top Rooms, $195. Mildred T. Kemp Guesthouse, $195-$240. Eastern Shore Country Farmhouse $150-$159. Entire farm-house, $550. Children under 12 free. Breakfast is included with all rooms.
