Long live family cabin traditions

By: 
Lisa Ingebrand, LRnews@frontiernet.net

For the past 11 years, my family has rented a cabin at Boyd Lodge near Cross Lake for one week every summer.

The crew of eight includes: my husband, two daughters, parents, brother, sister-inlaw, and myself.

We’ve been in the same cabin for 10 of the years.

Everyone knows which bed they will be in and how/ where to “properly” store our groceries for the week (and we know to make two batches of Chex mix).

Before we leave home, we know where we’ll dine out (The Wharf, Moonlight Bay, Norway Ridge, Manhattan Beach, etc.) and just how we hope to spend our days away, together in the northland.

Sometimes, I think it’s time for a change.

Maybe we should switch it up and go somewhere else for our one-week family trip in August. See something new? Do something different?

But then, we go and have a great time, once again, and I kick myself for thinking we should ever lose this family tradition, which truly stretches back decades—way before I was even born.

My paternal grandparents first vacationed at Boyd Lodge when my dad was maybe 10 or 12 years old. While he can’t remember the specifics of the trip, which became annual vacations, he does fondly remember his time playing on the beach, swimming, and fishing with his family.

This tradition continued until about the time my dad entered high school.

Then, in the early 1980s, my parents decided to restart the tradition by bringing my brother and me to Boyd Lodge for one week of family fun in August. My paternal grandparents even joined us! So, I grew up always looking forward to that one week every August when we would all take a break from regular life and enjoy long, relaxing days with each other.

Of course, those relaxing days were filled with horse riding, water skiing, tubing, swimming, hot tubbing, golfing, dining out, shopping, bicycling, and more. Turtle catching in the resort’s “turtle pond” was a favorite activity. My brother and I would spend hours on the paddle boat in that little pond, netting turtles, then “test racing” them to weed out the slow ones (and keep the fastest ones in our bathtub until the end-of-the-week turtle race). We often won.

My family ended our annual Boyd Lodge trip around the time I started high school.

Years later, I returned to the beautiful resort as a mom—pregnant and chasing a two-year-old. My husband, parents, brother, and sister-in- law all made the trip with us, which kick-started another round of an old—and wonderful— family tradition.

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