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Miracle Path offers inspiration along Geneva Lake shoreline

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Photo by Terry Mayer

Inspirational messages greet passersby along a portion of the Geneva Lake Shore Path known as the Miracle Path. Visitors are invited to sign and share their thoughts in a notebook outside of Carolyn Gable’s home along the path.

Carolyn Gable, a homeowner along the Geneva Lake Shore Path, hired a muralist to paint quotes on her property along the section of the route..

LAKE GENEVA--Thousands walk the Geneva Lake Shore Path each year. It is more than 20 miles in length, and few walk it all in a day. However, there is one section in particular that invites visitors to come back again and again. It’s called the Miracle Path.

Along the eastern stretch of the path, you’ll pass Carolyn Gable’s house. Here, you’ll find a definite welcome, a deliberate “I’m so glad you stopped by.”

Scripted into the white, split-rail fence are messages of hope, peace and encouragement. To take it all in, you actually have to stop. That means, of course, your pause is invited.

Causing you to linger even longer is a simple podium that holds a notebook. Since 2008, more than 12,000 people have filled 14 such notebooks and Gable keeps them all. In their pages, they have immortalized their hopes, their dreams, their gratitude. But sometimes, they share their anger, their sorrow, their pain.

In a way, the notebooks are prayers not unlike the prayers Gable used to say as she walked the shore path years ago.

A former waitress, who 20 years ago opened her own transportation company from the decidedly unglamorous digs of her basement, Gable is living proof that anyone -- even a single mom with seven mouths to feed -- can succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Today, her office is not in the basement. Her home in Illinois is nicer. Her mansion on Geneva Lake is nicer still. As successful as she is on the outside, though, she said she’s still the same on the inside.

“I always feel like I’m a work in progress,” she said at the end of a busy day. “I never got to the point where I’m, like, ‘Oh, wow, I can take a break.’ It never ends when you’re a mom. You’re always a mom, and when you work, there’s always work.”

A woman of faith, Gable said she used to pray to be able to afford a house like the one she now owns on Geneva Lake. She said she had a nice place over at Abbey Springs, a second residence for which she was extremely grateful. But she always wondered how the people inside the huge estates did it.

Read the complete story.

If you go

To access Carolyn Gable’s Miracle Path, start at Library Park in downtown Lake Geneva and travel east, past the Riviera. Her home is before Stone Manor.

From Library Park and back, it’s about a four-mile walk. There are no public restrooms on the path and it is not handicap accessible. Bikes and strollers are not permitted.