Countdown to Lakery

I have become sort of reconciled to not leaving the house without a driver or extreme pain. I was able to get delivery of both restaurants and groceries during my captivity when needed, but even that wasn’t terribly convenient as my livingspace is on the top floor of the house and stairs are still required. While I can walk enough to go down stairs, they’re still not fun, and large grocery orders mean multiple trips up and down the death-boards.

I had my first solo visit to a grockery store on my own last week, and it was much celebrated. There is something especially difficult about not being able to buy your own groceries, and I found it independence-sapping. The main impetus behind this shopping trip was to purchase supplies for an upcoming road trip. The combination of shopping freedom and impending escape from the city was heady, and led to the purchase of far too many portable snack foods. If we decide not to pick up real supplies on the way there, we will still have plenty to eat before resorting to cannibalism. 

I am ridiculously excited about the opportunity to get out of town. I haven't really had much to post about, or any decent pictures to put up, because every day is pretty much the same when you're bed-ridden, and there are laws about posting too many pictures of cats on the internet.  

When I was growing up, my family kept a lake cabin on Benson Lake in Washington. I always spent the bulk of the summers there, often with my uncle’s family who relocated from California every summer.

The lake is tiny, warm, and clean, and I always liked swimming in it, despite my mother trying to make lake sharks a thing. (Side story: I once pitched a tent on the dock to sleep in while staying at the cabin with my parents. My mother convinced my boyfriend to wear a wetsuit, and swim underneath the dock to shake it and pretend to be a shark. I’m not sure he fully understood the plan, because at one point after a few minutes of me not reacting, he started yelling “Dock shark! Dock shark!”)

When I was in my 30s, my friends and I began to have regular cabin weekends, filling the car with costco burgers and eating nothing but that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had some great times out there, and were starting to get very attached.

Then one day, my family told me they were going to sell the place. Several of my friends were interested in buying it, and my mother promised me she would tell me when they were ready in the coming year. She called back a day later to say it was sold. My friends have never really forgiven my family for selling it for a criminally low price to someone else, and depriving us of our summer playground.

We looked for a comparable place to buy, but they were all 2-3 times the price and in much worse shape. One we went to had a deck so rotten that our feet went through the wood. It was two doors down from our cabin, had no indoor plumbing, and was listed for 100k more than ours sold for. None of the cabins we saw really suited our needs or were right.

During my captivity, I randomly looked at airbnb, to see pretty apartments in other places. During my searches I put in Benson Lake just to see if anything was available. This isnt an unusual search for me, every now and then I look to see if our cabin is listed on real estate sites. I have a lot of strange dreams about just going out to it and using it without the new owner knowing. We never have, though we have gone to the lake’s public boat launch to swim and hang out a few times.

At any rate, this particular search bore fruit. I found a single cabin on the tiny lake for rent. And so it was rented, and now we are going.  The cabin is tiny, one bedroom (“sleeps four” is optimistic, one of us slept on the floor) and we can’t have all our friends here because there are Rules about that. Additional rules included that the owner lives next door and his mother lives in the garage off this cabin, which means that although we intend to smuggle two more people in to hang out we will probably be caught.