Changed by Wambolts

Five things Wambolts has taught us about building a life around what matters.

This summer, Wambolts celebrated 125 years of guests.

Soon, our family will celebrate five years since we signed the papers, took a deep breath and became the owners of an old Minnesota resort with 15 historic log cabins, a beautiful stretch of Upper Bottle Lake shoreline and an almost comical number of things that could go wrong.

Five years is a tiny piece of 125. But it has been enough to change nearly everything about our lives.

Since buying Wambolts, we have celebrated three high school graduations, one middle school graduation and one college graduation. We have faced health challenges in our extended family, including with both of our moms. We have weathered storms, rising interest rates, staffing puzzles, broken equipment and seemingly endless renovations and repairs.

We were even fired by our laundry service. In retrospect: it was a blessing.

We have made thousands of beds, cleaned cabins, hauled garbage and unclogged things no one wants to discuss. We have learned that owning a resort is both more wonderful and far less glamorous than most people imagine.

Through it all, we have been given the most extraordinary gift: people.

The people who work beside us. The people who have returned to Wambolts for decades. The people who arrived for the first time this summer and somehow immediately understood the place. The former owners and their families who entrusted their stories to us. The neighbors, friends and community members who showed up to celebrate 125 years.

Wambolters* are real. Wambolting* is a real thing.

After this summer, and nearly five years of living inside this enormous family bet, I think we’re starting to understand what it means.

1. Protect what matters

Pay attention to what feels too important to lose.

For us, it was family time. Clean water. Old cabins. Minnesota lake days. Places where people put down their phones, go barefoot and remember how to be together.

Wambolts was fully a product of the pandemic. It came from a season when we were all forced to think about mortality. My dad had died, and our grief made time feel suddenly more precious. We were thinking deeply about our family, our values and the unsettling speed with which life can pass.

We did not buy Wambolts because we had always dreamed of running a resort. We bought it because we wanted our lives to more closely reflect what we said mattered.

Wambolts gave those values a physical place to live.

We were not starting something new. We were stepping into a story that had begun generations before us. Families had already been coming to Upper Bottle Lake for more than a century to fish, swim, gather around tables and watch the sun rise over the same water.

Then the resort closed, and that tradition went quiet.

We did not create the magic here. Our job is to recognize it, protect it and help it continue.

We save what can be saved. We restore old cabins because they hold memories. We make changes when they help Wambolts survive. We try to leave the land, the lake and the buildings stronger than we found them.

History stays alive because each generation decides what is worth carrying forward.

Find what you want to protect. Then build your life close to it.

2. See What’s Possible

Opportunity rarely arrives looking like opportunity.

If we had seen only the falling-down cabins, we would have missed the ones that were still in remarkably good shape. If we had seen only an empty resort, we would never have imagined families returning, children filling the beach and people gathering here again.

But vision cannot be wishful thinking. It has to be both hopeful and honest.

Cabin 11 was sitting on coffee cans and cement blocks. Parts of Cabins 1 and 15 had essentially collapsed, with trees growing through them. We did not pretend those problems were smaller than they were. We looked closely, asked questions, studied the property and tried to understand what could be saved.

Then we built new foundations.

That is true in life too. You need the imagination to see what others overlook and the honesty to see exactly what you are taking on.

Over the past five years, many people have told me, “My lifelong dream was to own a resort.”

Usually, that sentence is followed by “but.”

And yes, there are plenty of reasons not to do it.

It takes money, land, sweat, risk and an unreasonable tolerance for broken equipment. It involves storms, interest rates, family health worries, staffing challenges and laundry emergencies.

We work hard. There are probably easier ways to make money.

But money was never the whole measure of this bet. We wanted to build a life close to what matters.

We do not regret being brave enough to try.

Courage is not recklessness. Study the numbers. Understand the land. Talk to people who have done it. Ask hard questions. Know what you can afford to lose.

Look beyond what is broken, but do not look away from it.

Have a vision for what could be. Then do the work to give that vision a solid foundation.

3. Find Your People

Big, complicated dreams are never carried alone.

Entrepreneurship stories tend to focus on the person who had the idea or took the risk. That is not how Wambolts works.

Our kids were deeply involved in the conversations about whether we should buy Wambolts in the first place. This was a family bet, and we made it knowing it would change all of our lives.

It did.

Since then, they have cut paths, fixed boats, filled gas tanks, put in docks, raked up garbage after a bear flipped the dumpster, scrubbed toilets, moved an unreasonable amount of furniture, battled spiderwebs and beehives, made beds, folded laundry, split wood and stacked it again.

They have grown up inside this place, and they are still part of the conversations about what comes next. What we fix. What we change. What we protect. What kind of place we want Wambolts to be.

And then other people began showing up too.

Some came into our lives exactly when we needed them most. I sometimes think my dad sent them.

My dad would have loved Wambolts.

It also would have stressed him out tremendously.

I am deeply sorry he never got to be with us during this chapter. But I know our grief over losing him helped guide us here, and I like to believe he somehow sent us people who could help carry what he could not.

They have arrived in different ways. Some can fix nearly anything. Some notice the gap before we do and quietly step into it. Some bring the muscle, the calm or the willingness to move the same pile of lumber more than once.

They clean, build, repair, haul, problem-solve and keep things moving. More importantly, they care about this place as something bigger than a job.

And then there are our guests.

The families who return to the same cabins. The children who measure their growing up in Wambolts summers. The people who share photographs and stories, bring friends and care for this place as if it belongs partly to them.

It does.

Wambolts works because people keep showing up for the place and for one another.

The dream may begin with you, but it becomes real through the people willing to carry it beside you.

Find your people. Let them help.

4. Know what you bring

When I taught high school entrepreneurship, I used our story to show students that the path to becoming an entrepreneur is rarely straight or predictable.

Sometimes the clues have been there all along, hiding inside the things that come naturally to you.

Sometimes your senior class names one before you are ready to hear it.

In high school, I helped start the first girls’ golf team. I was our class speaker. I did things I considered important and ambitious.

Then my senior class voted me “Best Hostess.”

I was deeply offended.

Of all the things I had done, that was what they noticed?

It took me years to understand that they may have recognized something in me before I did.

Hospitality is not setting a perfect table or making everything look effortless. It is noticing people. It is anticipating what they need. It is creating a place where they can exhale. It is making room for rest, joy, connection and belonging.

As I got older, I met James, who is also a natural caretaker. We loved real estate and went to random open houses for fun. We became students of property, possibility and value.

We loved Minnesota. We loved the lake and the way people become more fully themselves when they get outside, get off their screens and spend time with their families—or with the people they have chosen as family.

Wambolts sits at the intersection of what we are good at, what holds our interest and what we love.

But knowing your strengths is only half of it.

Take an honest inventory of yourself. Your talents, interests, limitations and blind spots all belong in the plan.

A dream does not require you to be good at everything. It requires you to understand what you bring, recognize what is missing and find people whose abilities complement your own.

5. Make it count

We don’t know the moral of our story yet. We are still living it.

But I know we want to build a life that has one.

Not a perfect life. Not an easy one.

A life whose choices add up to something you believe in.

Help people when they need it, because you will need help too. Protect beautiful places. Support other people’s dreams. Bring people together. Go barefoot. Swim in the lake even when the water is colder than you would prefer. Laugh while doing hard things.

Leave something better than you found it.

Before our oldest son turned 18, he told me he wanted a tattoo. I said that was fine, as long as I could get one too.

We spent nearly a year trying to decide what to get.

Then, just before we opened Wambolts, he said, “Let’s get the W.”

His reasoning was simple: whether Wambolts succeeded or failed, buying the resort had already changed us.

So we did.

And he was right.

We are changed.

Someday, our five children will look back on these years and understand them in a way I never can. They will know what it was like to grow up inside this enormous family bet.

They will remember the work, the worry and probably their mother frantically searching for her coffee mug or a Diet Coke.

But I hope they also remember the lake. The people. The laughter. The summer their family stood among generations of Wambolters and celebrated 125 years of a place that survived because people kept deciding it was worth saving.

I hope they remember that we were brave enough to build a life around what we loved and generous enough to make room in it for other people.

Five years is a tiny piece of 125.

We are responsible for only a handful of Wambolts summers. But those summers have taught us that a place survives because people decide it is worth protecting. A dream survives because people help carry it. And a life becomes meaningful when its choices add up to something we believe in.

Maybe that is what Wambolting really is.

It is caring for a place and allowing that place to care for you.

It is making the beds, protecting the history, sharing the lake and welcoming the next person into the story.

It is building a life you are glad you chose.

Lake Days. Then. Now. Always.

*Wambolter
noun

Someone who feels at home in nature and knows how to savor a lake day. Guest, neighbor, friend or crew. A person who relaxes deeply, cares for the place and appreciates the simple magic of being here.

*Wambolting
verb

To slow down, settle into lake time and find yourself in nature. To go barefoot, breathe in the pines, swim, paddle, fish, read, nap and appreciate the day as it comes.