It's no fun arriving at your hotel after dark, at the end of a long day on the road. That goes double when it's a place you've never been to before and it's in the woods.

Luckily for me, there wasn't much traffic on the evening last fall when I drove to The Sagamore. And I was relieved to find a large, well-lit sign pointing to the hotel as I passed through the village of Bolton Landing on New York State's Highway 9N. From there it was an easy drive across a bridge to the hotel, which sits on an island.

Feeling frazzled after the trip, and more than a bit hungry, I barged right in, dropped my luggage in my room, and repaired to the bar for a sandwich.

It was only the next morning, when I had slowed down and when daylight had lit up the area, that I realized what a lovely place The Sagamore is: an elegant, old, but updated resort in a spectacular setting on an island in Lake George on the rim of New York State's Adirondacks.

I often visit the Adirondacks, and the High Peaks area around Lake Placid in particular. But I rarely had occasion to venture farther south, towards Lake George -- a skinny lake about 50 kilometres long and at most seven kilometres wide.

With daylight, I discovered that the lake is lovely, surrounded by plenty of forested mountains. It was also a bit of a surprise to find that the area is not as developed as I might have thought, considering that New York City is 350 kilometres away. The Sagamore, I was told, faces protected land.

The Sagamore was built to take advantage of its lovely natural setting.

It was first erected in 1883 as an elegant summer resort for well-heeled city folk who summered in the area. Damaged several times by fire, it was rebuilt in 1930 in that clapboard style that is common to resort hotels of the era. The Sagamore is now an official landmark in the United States' National Register of Historic Places.

Like many such resorts, it went into decline when travel habits changed after the Second World War and eventually closed in 1981.

And like many such resorts -- at least the ones that weren't destroyed -- it got a new lease on life. Given an initial renovation in the 1980s, it is now owned by a company called Ocean Properties that runs similar old hotels, and is being prettied up once more.

I have always been of two minds about old hotels.

On the one hand, they're architecturally interesting and they are often in superb settings.

But they can also be pretty creaky too. That creakiness, which can be all too literal, kind of spooks me. It makes me think I'm on the set of some horror film. (I've felt that way ever since I visited the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., where Stephen King wrote The Shining.)

Thankfully, The Sagamore has been renovated and modernized to do away with creakiness. Ocean Properties added three dozen new rooms to the hotel in 2009, for example, updated others, and put on a new roof last winter.

The room I stayed in was one of those that had been redone and it felt very comfortable and modern, with high-end bathroom fixtures and a comfy new bed.

The post-renovation decor is elegant country.

For example, in my bathroom, toiletries were displayed in a cute little birchbark canoe.

Because The Sagamore was built as a resort, it offers a lot of services and is to some extent self-contained. The place includes the hotel proper, with 138 rooms, as well as a number of adjoining lodges and condos with more than 200 additional rooms.

Guests have the run of the 70-acre resort, which includes an 18-hole golf course, conference facilities, a marina, a pool, a spa and access to various outdoor activities. There's also the lake itself, the quaint little town of Bolton Landing and of course the Adirondacks.

Because my visit to the The Sagamore was part of a longer trip, and because I visited in the fall, I didn't take advantage of everything it has to offer -- particularly if you go in summer.

But what I did find was peace and quiet and a good place to relax and enjoy a good meal.

Kevin Rosa, the hotel's director of marketing and sales, says the hotel's main market is the New York City metropolitan area. People most likely to visit are older couples.

"We don't put a lot of families in the main building," says Rosa, adding that groups are more likely to stay in the lodges.

This past winter, for the first time, the hotel closed for the winter season. It reopened at the end of April.