Rabbit Run Inn

Rabbit Run Inn

Your ultimate innkeepers.

by Charles McKelvy

 

(Sawyer, Mich.) . . . It’s the height of the season, and innkeepers Rodney and Linda Jo Clough are all for having us over to their Rabbit Run Inn in Sawyer for grilled vegetables, great conversation, canine companionship with their three dogs, and, first and foremost, the nightly feeding of the koi.

“Come at 6 if you can,” Rodney says on the phone, “because that’s when Linda Jo likes to feed the fish.”

So we head on up Red Arrow Highway and hang a right at Elm Drive and arrive at the newly constructed inn with old world charm and designer furnishings with five minutes to spare before show time at the pond.

Teddy the greeter.

Teddy, the 15-year-old poodle the couple found at a construction site in Baltimore when they lived in Maryland, greets us at the door.  Then Lulu, the lively three-year-old French bulldog, heads straight for Natalie and nearly knocks her over with her dogged determination to be her new, best friend.

Arabella, the eight-year-old greyhound who wisely refused to take the lure and race, regally rises from her resting cushion in the Clough’s dining room and deigns to greet us in her stately manner.  Then she goes back to her rest as her humans, Rodney and Linda Jo, welcome us to Rabbit Run Inn and bid us follow them out to the pond where a multitude of hungry koi await their nightly feeding.

The retired racer.

Linda Jo produces the fish food and a scoop and says one feeds the fish with a graceful flinging motion.

She demonstrates.

The colorful koi swarm and swirl and rise to the pellets of yummy fish food.

“Try it,” Linda Jo says, smiling.

Natalie takes a turn, and then I move along the bank and fling a cup full at the koi who are following my every move.

“What would happen if I fell in there right now?” I wonder aloud.  “Would they eat me?”

Rodney and Linda Jo scoff at the notion, but then they do allow as how the denizens of their pond do make it all the way through winter without nightly feedings.

Meaning?

Well, perhaps the koi are coyly feeding on fellow koi throughout the winter.

We don’t want to go there, so we go to the rustic natural furniture Linda Jo and Rodney have arranged pond-side and settle in for gourmet-grade guacamole and chips and tales of when the famous “fish truck” came to Baroda, Michigan.

Yes, Linda Jo explains, when one wants to order more koi for one’s koi pond, one calls this company in Missouri, and they dispatch a fish truck staffed by two colorful gentlemen who await their customers at a given spot in Baroda, for 45 minutes.

“If you don’t appear during those 45 minutes,” Linda Jo says, “the fish truck leaves.”

But Linda Jo and Rodney Clough did not slough off their recent appointment with the fish truck in nearby Baroda.   They met the men from Missouri and were thus presented with some colorful new fishy friends from the tanks on the truck.  They then transferred said koi in a water-filled plastic bag to their pond, released them and watched the new koi become one with the old koi.

All very exciting, and there we were pond-side to hear all about it on a Saturday night at the height of THE SEASON.

Yes, the Inn was fully booked, but the innkeepers were not in the least harried.  Sure, they said, they work 24/7 and are always ready at the ring of a cell phone to rush to their guests’ assistance, but they practice the relaxed manner of living they preach to their patrons, most of who hail from that big city across the pond called Chicago.

Rodney is at home in the kitchen.

In fact, Rodney and Linda Jo explained how one high-powered executive type brought his wife over to the Rabbit Run Inn for a restful weekend after seeing the inn featured on Channel 2 in Chicago in May.

The husband was totally wound up when they first arrived, but within hours he was responding to the patient pampering by sleeping in and kicking back and just enjoying the gentle flow of life next to a koi pond.

Granted, great blue heron do appear from time to time in search of not-so-coy koi, and Rodney or Linda Jo have to hustle out and scare them off, but life at Rabbit Run Inn is, for the most part, most serene.

It certainly was the night Natalie and I knocked on the door and settled back for some superb vegetables grilled on the barbie and the kind of far-ranging conversation we have come to expect from our friends, Rodney and Linda Jo Clough.

Let’s face it sports fans, Natalie and I are always on vacation, so when we get an invitation to have dinner with the innkeepers of a bed & breakfast that has been featured in Midwest Living and other leading magazines, we hop to the koi pond in joyful anticipation.

We ate every last delicious bite put before us, and we dreamed with Linda Jo of riding camels across Morocco, and we talked of their times in Chicago, Baltimore, and Key West and we doggedly petted Lulu, and Teddy, and Arabella to their utter delight. And, just as we were preparing to leave, the inn cell phone jangled in Rodney’s pocket, and the innkeepers rushed in an orderly manner to tend to the late-needs of one of their guests.

Rodney and Linda Jo Clough were on top of everything as we made our way along Elm Drive to Red Arrow Highway and home to Harbert.

It was all good, and it can be even better for you and yours at Rabbit Run Inn.  For reservations, please call or go on-line: 269-405-1050, www.rabbitruninn@comcast.net.

Rabbit Run Inn is relaxing!

Here, fishy fishy!

###

 

Advertisement