I’d like to hear about past and present summer rituals, routines, practices in your childhood or current family. Both singular and recurring.
Did you go to an away camp? Did/does your family have a cabin/cottage in the woods or at the seaside? Do you get away from it all–and I do mean all–by going off by yourself to a writer/athlete/spiritual retreat? Do you climb mountains, fish, or hike by yourself or with others?
Regale those of us who never go anywhere with tales of The Summer Love, The Big Family Fight, The Last Time We Were Together… you know, make us laugh, make us cry, make us jealous, or make us glad we never had to go on vacation with you or your family. Include the good, the bad, and the ugly.
ThelmaLou sits back with popcorn and a cold sweet-tea…
My paternal grandpa built a lake cabin in the 50s. He died suddenly at that cabin at the age of 59. My grandma didn’t want to go there anymore, so my family used that cabin every summer weekend and also for 2 weeks every summer. My grandma and the rest of the family would come up on Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day for a big spaghetti meal.
When I think of my childhood, I think of the cabin. My 3 sisters and I entertained ourselves endlessly with fishing, swimming, digging worms, rowing the boat, lighting firecrackers, playing old 45s, playing Sorry, roasting marshmallows, and hot dogs, and just playing. Besides the fishing boat, we had a pontoon boat. My dad would take us all out on the pontoon. While he fished, we’d read, play cards, sometimes fish, and eat snacks. Sometimes we’d tie up at the island, and we’d run around and explore.
It was an idyllic time that I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Every summer we would hitch up the old Glasspar and go to Lake Havesu for a week of waterskiing. This was at the same time they were reassembling the London Bridge. Besides skiing, we would make side trips to Indian ruins, Parker Dam, and nearby caverns. One day, the temp hit 123 degrees. We beached the boat about a hundred yards from a Dairy Queen. A hundred yards of scalding sand! With only flip flops to protect our feet. It was a 10 year old’s version of Hell.
When I was a kid, we went on annual vacations along with three other families – the families of three of my dad’s best friends and fraternity brothers from college.
These trips usually involved one or two days of driving to get there, and then a week to ten days at the destination. The group went to various locations, but when I was 8 or 9, we all went to a “state resort park” in Kentucky (think a state park, only with a hotel, cabins, etc.), and the parents all decided that they really liked that experience.
So, that was our summer vacation every year, until I was 17 or so: we’d try different parks, but most of the ones we stayed at were in the western part of Kentucky, around the “Land Between the Lakes” – they featured boating, fishing, golf for the parents, and a lot of organized activities for the kids.
My parents weren’t big on vacations when I was a kid. We went on a few vacation trips, but I could literally count them on one hand and have fingers left over. My wife is the youngest of 6, and her parents used to take their kids on vacations, but by the time she was old enough to remember them her parents had largely stopped.
So my wife and I tried to make up for that by taking our kids on a lot of outings. We did vacations to Chicago, Washington D.C., a vacation to the Munising area in Michigan’s U.P. where we did a Pictured Rocks boat tour and a glass-bottom shipwreck tour, and many Amusement Parks like Cedar Point and Michigan’s Adventure. Also many local trips, like to the Detroit Zoo many times (we had season passes for a few years), and hiking in local wooded areas. Beaches, community pools. Also many Florida trips, since my sister lives there, but that was a Winter thing.
We also did a lot of camping. A friend has a few acres in Northern Lower Michigan next to a nice canoeing / kayaking river, and also a State Park that has one of the last areas of virgin forest left in Michigan. I (sometimes with our wives, sometimes just my friend and I with our kids) would go up there every Summer. I didn’t imprint the general love of camping on my kids that I had hoped for, but they loved going up to that piece of land every Summer. We had a lot of good times up there.
When I was a kid the community had a large outdoor pool, privately owned. My family was pretty poor but my mom made sure to get us passes every year. We spent every day, all day at the pool. Mom packed a lunch and filled up the ol’ pump-top beverage dispenser. We weren’t allowed to buy lunch at the concession stand, but if we brought our own money we could buy a treat. I usually got some Lik M Aid.
We occasionally had a float we’d use. We always had a Nerf ball to play with in the pool, which was nice because you could throw it far if it was wet but it wasn’t going to hurt anyone. During pool breaks we’d play Running Bases with the other kids.
At one point the pool got a waterslide. I liked it, I was good at it. I was NOT good at the diving boards - they were so high! I was very good at jumping off the wall in the deep end, and also pushing off and touching the bottom with the tips of my toes.
We had swimming lessons every year. In the pool, outside, in the cold, at god-awful-early-oclock. Before the pool opened. At the end of class there was always calls of “MOM ARE WE STAYING?” or did you have to go home for something else?
The pool was at the bottom of a hill, covered in clover. Every few days you’d see a kid run up the hill then collapse because they’d stepped on a bee running up that hill. Happened to me a few times!
Ok I’ve gone on long enough. There’s tons of stories about a decade+ of summers at the pool. It was a grand old time!
I didn’t realize that we didn’t have air conditioning at home until the pool closed and we had to spend summers at home. Yuck.
My dad, his brother and their two friends bought some lakefront property in the '60s and built cabins on it. My dad was a teacher and we spent multiple weeks up at the cabin each summer from when I was ~0 to ~20. It was a combination of fun and tedium for me; we played lots of card games and board games but at home we had TV and computer games. The lakeshore wasn’t great for swimming (rocks and weeds) and I wasn’t very outdoorsy as a kid.
Nowadays, my summer tradition is going to the Canadian National Exhibition (almost) every year: I eat a corn dog, pet a llama and watch the ice skating show (and sometimes part of the air show). We’ve also gone car camping each summer for the past few years; the novelty is kind of lost on me after all of the time I spent in a cabin as a kid, but my wife likes it.
At one point we lived in a neighborhood with a pond, and I remember going in the morning and staying all day. Then sitting on the sofa in the evening watching TV and slathering Noxema all over my burning shoulders. To this day, the smell of Noxema takes me right back there.
Also, when you’ve been in the water all day, even sitting still you can still feel the motion of the water and of your body–really nice.
Don’t hold back, people… write as much as you feel like… seriously…
We lived in southern California, and though we vacationed and camped throughout the west, my favorite vacations were up to redwood country in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. We camped up there several times among the massive trees. My brother and I swam and hunted frogs in Grizzly Creek. We also stayed at Prairie Creek State Park, where wild elk roamed and if you were smart you stayed out of their way.
My Mom is from northern Alabama, so every other summer we would hop into the Chevy (always a Chevy) and make the 21 hour trip from southern Baltimore to Huntsville — pre-interstate highway. For two weeks.
With the interstates completed, it’s down to 11 hours.
Making root beer. Three or four times a summer, we would get out the glass quart bottles, wash them out, and make root beer using the canning kettle. Root beer extract, 20 quarts of water, yeast, and 4 pounds of sugar. My brother would fill the bottles using a funnel and a sauce pan, while I would cap the bottles with a lever-type bottle capper. Took about four days before it was ready to drink. Also had to remember to rotate the bottles every day or the yeast would settle to one side. Best root beer ever. Puts every commercial brand to shame, as well as being all natural. Made great floats.
They are indeed available, but I’m in my mid-70s now and don’t drink soda pop. I’m quite sure that everything you need would be at any brewing supply store. In the old days, we had to simply hold on to the old quart bottles (worth 2 cents each) from year to year. To my sibs and me, getting to make root beer was a bigger deal than going to the zoo.
I thought of a current thing we love to do on many Summer weekends-- kayaking! We started when the kids were still preteens, but they quickly became teens with their own interests, so it became more of a thing with just my wife and me. Sometimes we’ll invite a couple friends and lend them our kids’ old kayaks.
We’re lucky to live in an area with many lakes and two great kayaking rivers within a short drive of the house. Both rivers have a relatively gentle current, so we don’t have to just paddle downstream and do a two-vehicle thing-- we put in and paddle upstream as far as we feel like, then we turn around and let the current take us back. Great exercise! Both rivers, despite running through some generally built up suburban areas, are mostly wooded on both sides, so it feels like we’re in the wilderness. Our favorite river run is a little more than 2 miles upstream, so about 4 1/4 miles total. Lots of wildlife spotting happens-- great blue herons, snowy egrets, hawks, eagles, red wing blackbirds, swans, ducks, Canada geese, deer, muskrats, turtles, water snakes, many more I’m forgetting probably.
We generally prefer rivers to lakes when kayaking, but there are exceptions. There’s a lake nearby with a lot of canals that were built out from the lake to give a ‘Little Venice’ neighborhood access to the lake. We sometimes, for a change of pace, take the canals around. Over the years we’ve seen how the canal houses change as the owners get older or move and new owners take over. There’s a nice little lake in a nearby state park that’s a hidden gem-- even if it’s 90 degrees F on the 4th of July the little beach will be half full. We’ll take the kayaks there on really hot days, take off from the boat launch and find a secluded spot to beach the kayaks and jump in the water. I like to fish but my wife does not, so sometimes I’ll take the kayak out on a lake by myself fishing. Seeing a bass leap out of the water when it hits on a crank bait is way more dramatic from a kayak than from a dock or motorboat!
This weekend is supposed to get up to around 80F, so it may be our first kayak trip of the season. Hoping I still got what it takes to hoist the kayaks onto the racks on top of my Jeep and all the other stuff-- I’m turning 62 toward the end of the Summer, so I ain’t getting any younger. Fingers crossed I still have a few good kayaking years left in me!
My parents rented a cabin in the woods in the Adirondacks for years. Traipsing through the piney forests, watching for bears, catching tadpoles in a pond. It was heaven for me, a nature-loving kid…Later in life, early 20’s, relatives bought a big Queen Anne ‘cottage’ up in the Thousand Islands just a stone’s throw from Canada. Back in the days when it was nothing to leave home in the morning and make a beer run up to Canada. This cottage was on Wellsley Island, and it was heaven for ME, a 20 year old kid! My cousin and I were fearless, we’d sometimes drive over that enormous bridge to party in Alexandria Bay at night. But it was a quiet semi-rustic neighborhood where the cottage was, right up the street from the St. Lawrence river. Perfect for bike riding and walking down a boardwalk in a big marsh. We would watch enormous tankers and laker ships pass by down the seaway quite often, and we visited Boldt Castle which was on an island, still being renovated. (they did a wonderful job, saw it again a couple years ago). There was a big auditorium with benches down the street which was a movie theater at night and a church service in the morning, with bats hanging from the ceiling. Everyone in the family spent time in the cottage, which was very old, had several bedrooms, a big front porch. We all stayed in shifts. Eventually the cottage was sold, it could only be used in the summer (the town rolled up the sidewalks in October there and in A-Bay) and it got expensive what with taxes. Relatives are now all deceased, a few cousins left, all scattered… Best times of my life were spent there, it was a privilege.
I grew up on a farm in the middle of Kansas, and my parents were also both elementary school teachers. So we had to squeeze a lot of farm work into the summer months. Nevertheless, Mom and Dad made sure that we took a trip each summer, even if it was only to Kansas City or St. Louis to watch a baseball game. But there were also a couple of long, memorable trips, and by the summer of the year I turned 10, I had seen both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We stayed with family or friends if possible; if not, it was cheap motels, but we kids didn’t know the difference. Lots of miles in an un-air-conditioned car, but I have only fond memories of those journeys.
Gen-Xer here, and proud member of the Original Latchkey Kid generation. I don’t really remember how I was supervised over the summers (likely quite minimally) before adolescence, but the summers I spent prior to 4th, 5th and 6th grades were some of the best summers of my life. That’s because MammaHomie signed me up for this summer day care program for tweens at a nearby business. We’d play games inside the building (which had been a church and was full of nooks and crannies to explore), we’d have free play*, structured games and such, etc. And then there were the outings! We’d go to the Lake, we’d go roller skating, we’d make these little go-bags of snacks and take them to the movie theater that had 25-cent matinees in the summer. Roller skating was my favorite. I started by holding onto the wall and just kind of pushing myself, but then I realized that if I was going to be doing this at least once per week for the rest of the summer, I needed to ditch the wall and learn to skate without it, and so I did. Never learned to skate backwards or do any “dancing” or anything like that, but I could skate in circles like a pro.
I also remember the songs we’d sing on the bus ride to and fro. Quasi-vulgar tunes that our moms would probably … not care at all about if we sang them at home because the 70s were a different time. “Got a 'skeeter on my peter, whack it off…” To this day I wonder how that song made it to Springfield, Illinois when there was no internet. Another fun thing I remember was making candles, we used this scented wax that was popular in the 70s and had a glorious smell that I wish was still made.
Of course, this was also the age when I started noticing girls, so there’s that.
I honestly don’t remember how often, but my family (minus maybe my oldest siblings) did go camping . Most of the times I remember it was a small trailer – it had a galley but no bathroom. Some slept in it, and some (my parents IIRC) slept in the car – we had a large station wagon that with the rear seat down was big enough for adults to sleep in. We went to Peninsula State Park (a very popular park in Door County, WI though back then I don’t think you needed reservations) many times but also other parks*. We had a small (8"?) inflatable pig suction cupped to the front window and I named “Pig of the All” (I remember the name, but not naming it.) We did get a bigger trailer (may have had two axles) with a bathroom but only used it a few times.
After my dad died we did go car + tent camping – I know I brought friends (it was a large tent).
I still go camping about twice a year – usually car + tent but have done backpack, kayak, and bicycle. I have trip planned this summer – two nights at Island Park campground and one night in the Sheep Mountain Fire Lookout (both in the Bighorn National Forest) and two nights in Custer State Park.
I wanted to get in a pre-Memorial Day camp in, but it looks like the WX would make that sub-optimal.
* Here are some I remember:
We camped somewhere on the Wolf River (Wisconsin) my older siblings enjoyed the rapids. This was near or in the Menominee Indian Reservation.
Once in the Porcupine Mountains
I think one of the last trailer camps was https://tilledafalls.com/
When I was a kid my best friend’s Dad brought home a Sunfish sailboat one summer and taught us both to sail. His Dad then upgraded to a Hobie Cat, but we got to keep sailing the Sunfish every summer until it moved to Florida when he graduated college. I’ve been doing it since age 4, and now I live in a lake community and own 3 small sailboats (soon to be 4). The first of them goes in the water on Saturday while I do some work on a 1969 Sunfish I salvaged. It is exactly the same as the one I grew up sailing. I should have it race ready by the time the racing season starts on July 4th weekend.
