Retreats and Cabins

Minnesota has > 10,000 lakes.  The Minnesota dream for many is a cabin getaway. 

When you are semi-comfortable in life, you find a lake place that will be your retreat from the real world.  A place for your family, your kids and their kids to gather and make memories and learn to drive a boat and waterski, fish.  Maybe canoe or paddleboard.  Practice swimming.   Bonfires.  Mosquitos. 

Someday you’ll retire there, and fish and read and relax for the rest of your life.   

If you are really fortunate, your family already has cabin where you can do all of these things with your parents, siblings and the cousins. Bunk beds. Snowmobiling and ice fishing in the winter. Someone else in charge of the shoveling and racoons.

In Michigan, cabins are called cottages.  Friends there assumed that our cabins lacked running water.  Rest assured, these homes are generally not a hardship or roughing it.  

The lake place was my dream as well.  Growing up near the prairie lakes, most of my friends had cabins within an hour of home.  It sounds extravagant.   It is, and yet it is normalized here.  In the Twin Cities, most lake cabins are not within an hour—they are 2 to 5 hours, generally “up north”.   They are surrounded by pines and rocky terrain, not prairies and deciduous trees, maybe a rolling hill or two.   

When people say that they are going to the cabin, it is generally accepted that they are off the grid.  Maybe they have internet.  Maybe they don’t.  They aren’t planning to work on anything there other than their yards or lakefront.   

Cabins are a retreat, yes, and a lot of maintenance.  Lakes have associations, with strict rules about how much hardscape is allowed, what horsepower motors can operate, if at all.   The water is soothing and calming to gaze upon or be in; however, it is less than soothing when the power goes out from a storm, or the water is in your basement.  Someone or something breaks into your cabin, since it isn’t occupied full time.  

There’s the traffic jam to leave the city on Friday evenings, and an even worse one to return on Sundays.   

Since we don’t fish, or fix things, my wife and I agreed that we would not pursue the cabin dream.   Instead, we put in a swimming pool, our backyard retreat.  No, it is not a necessity.   We are lucky to have such resources.  It also means that the mom who was working could be in the backyard with our friends and daughters, instead of one mom taking off for the lake with the kids, driving and sitting in traffic for several hours each way.   

As we get closer to retirement, and our girls leave the nest, we ponder the next steps.  We don’t need a large suburban house with a backyard pool when it’s just two of us and a small zoo of cats. 

Knowing that we are still not likely to hang out on a lake full time, we now have an urban cabin. A condo downtown that overlooks the Mississippi River.  I am grounded by the water, the sound of it, watching the flow and seasons change, just as we would be on a lake.  We don’t have to maintain lakeshore or mow the lawn.  It is a great fit for us, a way to trial where we might want to be when we don’t have a commute to manage.  Yes, there is sometimes traffic to get there or get home.  However, there’s a smug luxury in knowing that we don’t have to hop in the car in the middle of the fourth quarter to try to beat the other 64,000 fans after the football game.   

We use it when we are going to Gopher football games, Lynx basketball games, theater and concerts.  We can light rail to the new Bar of their Own --https://www.abaroftheirown.com/ -- the sports bar for women opening this weekend on the West Bank of the U.   Pride.   Restaurants.  It’s a place where out of town guests can stay when they won’t all fit at our home, or if they are passing through or going to a concert or Vikings game.  Or their cat allergies will make them too miserable in our house.  

We walk when we are downtown, since our parking is already paid for with the condo, and why not?  It feels European, urban, and it’s good for us.  The dirty secret of lake cabins is that there isn’t a lot of walking space or trails.  You’ve got the (likely gravel) road, and that’s it.  And nothing is in walking distance—you're walking for exercise, not to get somewhere.  

When my wife stops taking call, and our children are launched, at some point we will sell our home and probably buy a bigger condo.   This is our trial to see if it is indeed a place that we would want to retire.  And so far, so good.  

In the meantime, we have the cabins of friends and family to satisfy our lake cravings.   We try to be good guests and get invited back.   

And as many struggle to have one place to call home, we count our blessings that we have two.  And that we are not one paycheck away from losing either.