My family would like to plan a reunion next summer for approximately 19 or 20 of us. We’d like a house that can fit all of us (at least 7 bedrooms) and preferably right on a lake with other activities nearby.
We’re looking into Lake Tahoe and perhaps Branson, MO, but the houses in those places either aren’t right on the lake or aren’t quite big enough.
If at all possible, we’d like someplace within an hour of an airport.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Can you rent a bigazz houseboat on one of those? Some of them are huge. Can’t get more “on the lake” than that. Not sure if Tahoe has them.
Not sure where you and your family are located, but the the adirondacks in upstate ny are pretty reasonable in the summer for a lake house usually about 2k/week for the size your looking for and about 1.5 from a small but int’l airport
Where are you located?
How far is everyone coming from?
Traverse City, MI has some awesome houses, views, dining, stuff to do there. One of the best indy bookstores around, too.
We are coming from all over the country, so there really isn’t any geographical limitations. That is one of the reasons we want to be near an airport.
Kid ages will be from a few months up to 16, so we will need pretty diverse activities available. That is one of the reason we would like to be near water… water seems to be a good diversion for kids of just about any age.
Well, if you call the Pacific a big lake… My family did a big family reunion a couple of years ago in Santa Barbara. Rented a house (well actually house and two cottages on one lot) with eight bedrooms. Not right on the Pacific, about a five minute walk from it. Worked out well for us.
About two hours from LAX, so that’s a minus.
VRBO has listings throughout the world and you can sort by number of bedrooms or by capacity.
I’ve planned family vacations for 12 (8 adults, 4 kids). Another area near the water is Puget Sound in Washington (might be farther than 1 hour from the airport though).
San Francisco has some possibilities too, if you prefer an urban vacation. This one sounds nice.
San Diego has the beach and lots of stuff for kids too. This one is in Encinitas.
Good luck planning and have fun!
I’ve been using VRBO for years to try and find places on vacations. It is an awesome site. The only problem I have with it is that they list things by city and not by number of bedrooms. I can sort within city by number of bedrooms. Also, you need to know what city you’d like to go to… which lead me to ask here for suggestions.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I don’t have a suggestion as far as location, but some members of my family attended a similar weekend (with the side of their family I’m not related to- I wasn’t shunned), and they rented two 4 br houses right next to eachother so one was kid central and one was where you could set a wine glass on a coffee table and not think about it too much. They all did things together, and the kids were always supervised.
One of their activites for the weekend was a talent show.
How big a deal is expense? There are a lot of places where you can rent cabins by private lakes. Normally you get any number of small cabins that are basically sleeping porches (they may or may not have plumbing) and then some sort of central area with a great hall and industrial kitchen. This can be really inexpensive.
One option - not near a lake per se, but… some years back, we had a big get-together of people from all over North America (and one from Australia). We had it near Orlando - actually rented two houses which a bunch of families shared. There was a pool in the backyard of each house, and obviously Disney etc. nearby.
If this were of interest, you could contact one of the vacation rental places down there, and request two houses within walking distance of each other; the houses have from 3-5 bedrooms.
Admittedly, Orlando in the summer is… suboptimal (the heat and humidity)… but there are certainly plenty of activities!
Forgot to mention - the place we used is here: http://www.closesttodisney.com/
but there are surely others who do the same sort of thing. The neighborhood we stayed in was in Kissimmee, and I suspect the bulk of the houses there were rentals. I don’t recall whether our house had a grill, but it had a pool (and whirlpool; we could have paid extra for that to be heated but in July, it seemed unnecessary!).
Expense is… not unlimited but it certainly isn’t a huge concern.
We’d really like to find a house that can hold all of us. It may sound crazy, but one of the really nice things about these vacations is kind of the forced socialization. People gathering in the kitchen or just sitting around talking.
As I mentioned above, we’d prefer to have just a single house, but I’ll keep the Disney idea in mind. Ideally we’d like to find activities that would involve everyone and not just everyone going off and doing their own thing. For example, last year we were near some stables and everyone did some horseback riding and there were other activities nearby such as hiking, bike riding, etc. We even went white water rafting one day which was a ton of fun.