Expedient escapes

Sometimes you just have that need to get away for the weekend. Your trip doesn’t have to be far away from home. It just needs to encompass one very important goal: relaxation.

With the natural outdoor beauty of our area, your mini-vacation should include outdoor activities that allow you to enjoy nature. This, combined with good food and a pleasant quiet spot where you can enjoy a good book and a glass of wine, is a great combination of ingredients to achieve the desired effect.

The Inn at Starlight Lake is nestled in the quiet and rural town of Starlight, PA, overlooking man-made Starlight Lake. In 1907, The Inn at Starlight Lake was built as a boarding house for people from the city to enjoy the country.

The inn is a bed and breakfast with quiet and pretty country-decorated rooms. It also has a restaurant with homemade culinary flair that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner 365 days of the year. The pastas and all the desserts are made from scratch.

The beauty of the rolling mountains is the perfect backdrop for swimming, biking, boating, fishing and cross-country skiing, all of which can be done on the premises. The inn also has a billiards rooms and a magnificent front porch that overlooks the sun-burnished lake. The unique stovepipe bar is a cozy nook where you can enjoy a cocktail at the end of the day.

The Eldred Preserve is best known for its trout ponds, where visitors can fish and take home their catch. A little-known fact about this wooded fishing resort is that it includes 3,000 acres of woods, ponds and lakes.

The preserve has a clay shooting range located on the premises. The five-stand range presents the shooter with an opportunity to shoot five sporting clays.

There are also two beautiful spring-fed lakes on the grounds of the preserve. Steges Lake, located at the southern end of the resort, is a more typical bass fishing lake. Steges is heavily wooded and murky, with lily pads floating on top of the dark waters.

Sunrise Lake, located at the northern end, is a 65-acre expanse of crystal clear waters. The lake is inhabited by large- and small-mouth bass, crappies, perch, pickerel, pan fish and hybrid stripers. Boat rentals are available on the lakes as well.

The stocked ponds located in the center of the Eldred Preserve are for trout and catfish. The catfish pond is catch and release. The trout ponds, on the other hand, are catch and buy the fish that you’ve caught by the pound. The preserve can also fully gear you up, for a rental fee, to fish any of the ponds or lakes on the premises.

A weary weekender can also enjoy one of the 12 trout dishes in the restaurant, which are prepared using the preserve’s very own trout. Cocktails can be enjoyed on the deck overlooking the pristine outdoor setting.

When it comes to rooms and facilities, Woodloch Pines is the biggest getaway in the area. Located in Hawley, PA, Woodloch has over 1,000 acres of property and can accommodate up to 900 guests.

Woodloch is widely known for its golf course, located at the springs. The course rates among the top golf courses in the United States. And at the center of Woodloch is Lake Teedyuskung, where many lakeside activities are available for the guests, including boating and water-skiing.

What else is there to do at Woodloch? You name it and chances are: yes, you can do that.

The guest packages include three huge meals a day as well as lively Broadway style shows. Other activities include swimming (indoor and outdoor), bingo, bumper cars and boats, arts and crafts, horseshoes and hayrides.

But, you can also relax at Woodloch. As of this summer, it has added a five-star spa to its premises. Here you can be pampered in a million different ways while your stress drains away.

Woodloch’s wooded beauty and its attention to treating guests like family brings in guests from all over the world.

You may have to work off stress from a long workweek, or you may have no excuse at all. You don’t need one to treat yourself to a weekend away from it all. And even a weekend is enough time to enjoy the beauty of one of our area’s many amenities.