# Staying in Sears _A crossroads in eastern Osceola County — the Amish farms, Big Lake, and the dark you actually drove out here for._ You smell the barns before you see one. Cut hay, warm diesel, something animal underneath it, and then the road bends and there they are — Amish farms, laundry strung between two posts, a buggy pulled onto the gravel shoulder to let the rental car by. Nobody waves. Nobody needs to. This is the country around Sears, and Sears is not a town. Call it a crossroads and you are closer to honest. It sits in Orient Township, in the eastern half of Osceola County, where M-66 runs south toward the US-10 corridor and a rail line the Flint and Pere Marquette pushed through still cuts the fields in a line nobody argues with. The place started as Orient. The railroad dropped a depot here in 1870 and renamed the whole thing Sears, after one of its surveyors, and that was that. There is a post office. There is a gas station out on M-66. A medium-sized Amish community farms the sections around it, and that is most of the inventory. Which changes how you drive. You share the road with buggies, and a buggy does about eight miles an hour, and you will crest a rise doing fifty-five with one in your lane and learn something about your own reflexes. Slow down early. In good weather the stands go up along the shoulders — brown eggs, baked goods, produce, a dollar in a coffee can nobody guards — and there is a bulk-goods market out on 50th Avenue where the money is real and the lighting is not electric. A lot of it shuts on Sundays. Plan around that or go hungry on the Lord’s day like everybody else out here. ### The drive does something to your sense of scale Come in from Evart, a few miles east, and watch the gas stations thin out and the cell bars go with them. Corn, then woodlot, then corn again. You will think you have missed the place. You have not — there was not much to miss, and that is not a complaint. The flatness reads as empty for about a day. Then it stops reading as anything, which is the part people drive a long way for. Know before you come that the errands live elsewhere. A full grocery run means Evart or Reed City. The nearest hospital is Corewell Health in Reed City, west on US-10, twenty-odd minutes when you are not stuck behind a buggy. ### What it’s for Water, mostly, and the water is a couple miles south. Big Lake — a plain name for a plain, good lake of a couple hundred acres — sits at the bottom of 50th Avenue, and the county park sits on its east shore. Crittenden Park is ten acres of mowed grass and hardwood, a swimming beach, a dock, and close to ninety campsites that fill with the same families every July. You cannot launch a boat from the park itself. You use the DNR ramp just west of it, and once you are on the water it is bluegill and crappie and largemouth, northern pike if you are patient, walleye if you are lucky or lying. The park rents rowboats and paddle boats by the hour to the people who forgot theirs or never owned one. By August the beach smells of sunscreen and lake weed and charcoal off somebody’s campsite, and the water at the dock goes near bathtub-warm on top while it stays cold ten feet down. The bigger draw runs a little to the north and west. The Muskegon River carries this whole side of the county — it comes through Evart’s Riverside Park with a launch and fishing platforms, and people tube it, paddle it, and stand in it in waders all summer. It is not a wild river up here. It is a working one, brown and steady and cold at the ankles in June. But the thing Sears actually sells is nothing, and it sells it well. Dark that is dark. A quiet with a texture to it — you start hearing the refrigerator, the wind moving through the corn, a dog two farms over deciding something. If that reads as thin, this is not your place, and no version of it will be. Some people need a town within walking distance. Sears will never be that. It is barns and a gas station and a great deal of sky. ### Where to stay You do not stay in Sears. You stay near it — on the river or the lake — and drive the few minutes back for ice. one of our [Michigan A-frame rentals](https://roamstays.com/type/a-frame/), [Rivers Edge Retreat](https://roamstays.com/properties/rivers-edge-retreat/), Rivers Edge Retreat sits on the Muskegon a short way off, close enough to Big Lake and Crittenden Park to make a whole day of the water and be home before the mosquitoes get organized. It is the one to book if the river is the point. If you would rather sit nearer to what passes for services, Coyote Fire Retreat is over toward Evart, minutes from the river at Riverside Park and from a bar and grill that stays open past dark. Neither house is fancy. Neither pretends to be. Both put you in the quiet and leave you to work out what to do with it. The full [Sears](https://roamstays.com/location/sears/) Sears guide holds the rest of what is out here. ### Eat, do, when Do not plan to eat in Sears. The food, what there is of it, is a few miles east, and we walked it in Where to Eat in Evart. The water gets its own notes — Crittenden Park and the Big Lake Beach for the swimming-and-camping version, and Paddling the Muskegon near Evart for the river. As for when: come in the back half of September if the calendar allows. The July families clear out, the lake holds its heat longer than you would guess, and the woodlots along 50th Avenue start to turn while the nights get honest and cold. There is a lake, a gas station, and a lot of dark between them. That is the offer. Take it or don’t. --- - Property page: https://roamstays.com/field-notes/staying-in-sears/ - Markdown: https://roamstays.com/field-notes/staying-in-sears.md - Last updated: 2026-08-07 - Site index (for AI): https://roamstays.com/llms.txt _A machine-readable copy of this page. Prices and availability, where shown, are live on the property page._