Hear for yourself what our guests are saying about what Quimby Country means to them
Hear for yourself what our guests are saying about their stay at Quimby Country. With the help of Ian Aldrich, senior writer for Yankee Magazine and Quimby guest, we have captured the words and reflections of our guests’ experience at Quimby Country and what matters most to them! By clicking on the picture icon below you can hear an assortment of stories from Quimby’s multi-generational guests, to some newer guests to a few of Quimby’s younger generation who have been summering at Quimby Country for much of their lives. Enjoy!
In 2019, the Schum family, Dana, her husband, Justin, and their three young children, Peyton, Bryant, and Jackson, experienced their first Quimby summer after winning a school auction. For the Schum’s the “family week” offered a perfect counter to their busy lives in Washington D.C. for the kids and the parents. “I work as a software engineer so I spend a lot of time in front of a computer,” says Dana. “The first three days we were here I did more reading than I had the entire year.”
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Lori Roberts’ childhood summers were framed by a remote family camp her father ran in what is now Maine’s Baxter State Park. When the business left her family’s hands, Lori doubted she’d ever come across anything like it again. But then, one day, a good friend who had visited Quimby Country, told her, “I have your replacement.” Lori was dubious. But then she visited. “She was 100 percent right and then some,” says Lori. More than three decades on, she and her family, which now spans three grown children and their children, make Quimby’s an annual part of their summer.
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Dick Martin’s first-ever Quimby week didn’t pack the kind of dreamy summer weather normally associated with the resort. It rained all seven days. So Dick, his wife Ginny, and their two kids, hunkered down in the cabin. They kept a fire going in the woodstove and did a lot of reading. “We played board games,” recalls Dick, a retired AT&T executive from New Jersey. “We did a lot of things we normally didn’t do at home.” That was in the early 1980s and the Martins have been coming to Quimby Country every summer since. Today, their children are grown with kids of their own, and they vacation at the resort together. “It’s an invigorating and restful week when we’re up here.
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Hear from the children of Quimby Country
If you happen to be visiting Quimby Country in late July, you’ll no doubt spot Beck Coakley helping out in some fashion in the dining room. Beck is a third-generation visitor and in between the bike riding and swimming, he likes to lend a hand serving food and bussing tables. It’s simply training, he says, for when he’s older and can come back for the full summer to work on staff. “I’m totally coming back,” he says. “Maybe I’ll be a chef, or waiter, or I’ll be a counselor.”
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Caitlin and Maggie Pataki come from a family who have called Quimby Country home since the early 1950s, when their grandmother, Jane, began coming as a young girl with her parents. The Quimby lineage runs strong in the family. Their father, Jon, and aunt, Daisy, worked as counselors at Quimby when they were teenagers, most summers, nearly 20 Pataki family members gather at the resort for family week. “It’s our family reunion,” says Maggie. Like their father and aunt before them, both Caitlin and Maggie both hope to work at Quimby when they’re old enough. “I plan on coming to Quimby’s for the rest of my life,” says Caitlin.
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As Sky Martin likes to tell it, he’s been coming to Quimby Country since “I can remember.” And he has. The New Jersey native is a third-generation Quimby family, who started coming as an infant, and his time in Vermont is one he considers precious. It gives him a chance to reconnect with family, see old Quimby friends, and disconnect from his otherwise busy life. “My friends don’t really understand this place,” he says. “They keep wanting to know when I’m going to come home from Vermont—aren’t I bored? How could I be? There’s too much to do.”
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Calvin Aldrich experienced his first Quimby summer in 2018, when his father, a writer for Yankee Magazine, was sent on assignment to put together a story about the resort. From the first day, he was hooked. “There’s just so much freedom,” he says. He loves playing tennis, getting up early to eat breakfast with his friends, and swimming out at the Rock. “It’s like living in this neighborhood with all your friends,” he says. “Maybe one day I can work here.”
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Visits to Quimby Country are an important part of Bowie Frank’s summer. Since he was seven months old, he and his twin brother, Saxson, have traveled with their parents, Brooke Bridges and Andres Frank, to the family resort from their home in Irvington, New York. It was the same for his mother, who began coming to Quimby with her parents, when she was baby. When she and Andre married, they chose the place to have their wedding. Bowie says he can’t imagine not coming to Quimby Country ever summer, nor can he imagine not continuing the tradition his parents started so many years ago. “I start thinking of coming back pretty much from the time I get back home,” he says.
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