When you have a cabin within 90 minutes of home, you need to escape to the lake as often as possible. That was my parents’ belief when I was younger. Sounds great now, but when you’re forced to go to your cabin every weekend of your youth, it wasn’t. Angsty teenage years when all I wanted to do was go to a mall with the girl I was “going out with” instead of a lake in small-town Wisconsin. I was an idiot then. Cabins are the best.

So I took an overnight trip last weekend. We left the house at 11am after sleeping in. That’s one of the best kinds of road trips: when you can sleep in before departing. All it took was a stop at the grocery store on the way up for snacks and beer. I also found a nail in the tire of my Subaru, but it’s still holding air so we drove it anyway. We just really wanted to get to the lake, that’s all.

The forecast called for scattered storms. Again, no problem. The cabin is on a lake. When it’s not raining, you can do all the things outside. When it is raining, you get to watch it rain on the water. That’s a win-win. So we fished and swam and had a fire and grilled and lounged and fished more and watched the little wood ducks and watched it rain before finishing the fire and going inside to watch soccer on television. What’s better?

Dear younger Kurt: don’t fucking complain about frequent cabin trips. You’re going to miss coming up here when you get older. Escape to the lake as often as possible.