There is nowhere on earth that says summer to me like the Adirondacks—in my opinion, the most beautiful part of New York State, and factually the largest state park in the U.S. When I was growing up, my grandfather’s best friend had a camp on the Hudson River, a small hand-built cottage that saw more wet swimsuits and card games and laughter in a single season than most places see in a lifetime. We spent a week or two every year, and I read book after book in the hammock on the screen porch, swam until I was pruney in the icy cold river, watched meteor showers from the dock, learned to water-ski (sort of; I am rather spectacularly bad at it), and learned I love the smell of pine trees and dirt more than almost anything else.

A couple of summers, though, we went to another part of the Adirondacks, Fourth Lake, to see a different friend of Grandpa’s. And while the couple that owned the camp were down-to-earth folks who were practically a third set of grandparents, this other friend of Grandpa’s, Mr. Dunay, was fancy. He owned a hotel! On a lake! And it had a guest cottage just for us!

We did many of the same things at the Wood Hotel as at the cottage on the Hudson—swimming, fishing, reading—but there were also special treats only a hotel could offer. Like going to the bar before dinner, where we drank Shirley Temples and played skee ball and pool. (We were, however, forbidden from sitting at the bar. My dad said it was illegal, that only adults could sit there. To this day, I don’t actually know if that was true.)

We had grown-up dinners in the dining room overlooking the lake, so grown up that my sister and I had to wear dresses, tights, and gloves, and my brother a jacket and tie. That sort of formality was already old-school by the time we experienced it in the early 1980s—the last gasp of a nearly bygone era.

My grandfather died when I was 10, and while we continued to go to the camp on the Hudson every summer for many years, we never again visited the Wood Hotel. As far as we knew, Mr. Dunay ran it until his death and then it sat, empty and unused, for many, many years. My mom vaguely recalled hearing his family didn’t want to sell to a developer, but she assumed they’d long since given in.

I still go back to the Adirondacks nearly every summer. It’s a bit of a haul from Washington, D.C., where I live now, as compared to when I lived in Upstate New York, but it is always worth the trip. My family no longer has access to the camp on the Hudson, so I’ve been dabbling in other spots, like Lake George and Loon Lake. This year, though, the pull of nostalgia was strong and I decided to go back to Fourth Lake.

On a whim, I typed “The Wood Hotel Fourth Lake” into Google, fully expecting to find nothing more than perhaps a few scans of faded photos, but much to my surprise, The Woods Inn popped up, and while the name was slightly different, the building looked quite similar to what I remembered. I pulled out a few old photos to compare, and yes…The Woods Inn was indeed the Wood Hotel of my childhood.

The history page on the inn’s website filled in some of 30-plus year gap since I’d last been there. My mom’s memory was correct: the property had been vacant for many years following Mr. Dunay’s death in 1989 as his family awaited preservation-minded buyers. They finally found the right people in 2003, when it was sold to Joedda McClain and Jay Latterman, who set about the challenging task of restoration. Their work included new plumbing, wiring, heating, and septic. The website mentions that in the process, many of “the exterior porches and stairs were replaced precisely as they once were.”

McClain and Latterman re-opened the hotel in 2004, and ran it for a decade before selling to Charlie and Nancy Frey in 2014. The Freys have continued work, adding a tented event space and re-building the guest cottage I had once stayed in, as the original had been lost to a fire.

Now, with both nostalgia and a preservation story driving me, I called my best friend to verify our vacation dates and confirm that she wouldn’t mind the somewhat-longer drive, and made the reservation.

I spent the next couple of months awaiting my vacation in a state of nervous anticipation. What if it was awful? What if it wasn’t the faithful restoration the website promised, and there was nothing that reminded me of those summers when I was a kid? I’ve been a preservationist in my heart longer than I’ve even known it could be a career; places are important to me. I knew the lake and the mountains would be what I wanted—the Adirondacks are wonderfully consistent like that—but I really wanted the hotel to live up to my memories, too.