Pembroke, VA – Oct. 9, 2025

Stop #14

This would be my first and only hotel experience while on this trip. The shower in the RV was better and actually found myself missing the RV a bit. I spent two nights here and we leave tomorrow to head to another RV stop. So I am publishing this a bit earlier. Also, above is from my last stop. It wasn’t anything special so I just added to this one.. which is way more special.

Here we are in Pembroke, Virginia OR Mountain Lake Lodge OR the place where they filmed Dirty Dancing! I am sure you remember a silly little movie about a 25 year old who gets involved with a 17 year old and they dance their way into a happy relationship that I am sure lasted FOREVER and made fathers across the world jump for joy.

If you don’t remember this movie, again, you are young. Be grateful. Our first memory of this place will always be that we were idiots and thought we could fit under the stone archway. We scraped under and backed out scraping again. Shocking right?

What I was really shocked about, but not really, was this hotel hasn’t changed anything since 1986. If they hadn’t filmed that movie here, it would have been closed a long time ago. We rented one of their cabins away from the lodge because Lanna howls when I am not around, and I thought she could potentially disturb someone. After arriving and looking around a bit, I realized, the only people she could bother are the ghosts of Dirty Dancing’s past. For real though.

The word on the streets of this lodge is that Patrick Swayze stayed in room 232? I think? I can’t remember. But they literally sell keychains that look like hotel keys just in case you care about this room enough to purchase a memento. Oh, and people would steal the shower curtain a lot if they stayed in that room just to be closer to him.

I told you nothing has changed here since 1986. I will include the link HERE to many DD items in case you need some holiday gift ideas 🙂 You are welcome! Mementos galore. I know because the employee at the store told me I was his best customer all day. I will never be in need of a Dirty Dancing shirt, sweatshirt, mug, another t-shirt, and another t-shirt. Oh, and some for my friends.

Now, this property hasn’t changed a lot since 1986. All except for one very important part of the name of this hotel: the lake! Apparently, that famous lake, where they practice their famous lift, is some sort of geological blah blah blah, on a fault, blah blah blah. Anyway, it dried up. No more lake. Like, at all. So when I show you the pics below, just picture a lake there.

They said it came back in 2000 or something and left again. So this is more like Mountain Lodge… the lake has vanished. They did find a dead body in there though. He had been in there for a very long time. I am not sure why they include that on the signage, but now you know and don’t care even more.

I sort of love that they have a scavenger hunt that is self-guided if you want to do it. We sort of did it and would have been successful if Paul had done the bunny hop and then been my “Baby” as we attempted the lift. He was not up for it, so we failed. Paul tried the hot tub, pool, and smaller pool combo while Lanna and I trailed along and saved a frog from the pool.

Other than that, there isn’t much to do here. You are way TF up in the mountains, so your whole life revolves around this place. Being that the Wi-Fi is also stuck in 1986, you almost find yourself doing the cha-cha in the gazebo. I’m just saying. We did show our little travel family the famous movie Dirty Dancing, and as you can see below, they loved it.