Last night I really wished I had been a real Blackhawks fan. It’s not that I wasn’t thrilled to see the team win, it’s just that I’m not a Blackhawks fan in the same way that I’m an unfortunate Cubs and Bears fan. If either of those two teams won their respective championships, the personal impact would be cataclysmic. I’m happy for all of the real Hawks fans out there, my long suffering uncle included. Of course as I sent some texts to clients who are of the “real fan” ilk, I had to include something about trying to figure out how to get Kane and or Toews to spend a little time at Lake Geneva this summer. After an afternoon spent cruising Geneva I have a feeling I know what Kane would say. Holy crap.
Aside from my Hawks joy, my magazine pick up, and a 5 hour home inspection, today is really all about one thing. Preparing to leave for my friends cabin. I left the house this morning with simple, but overwhelming, instructions. Pack the car for the cabin. Seems easy enough, and since I have only two kids instead of the five that my friends must bring to the cabin, the undertaking should be easy for me. It’s not. I’ve just mapped the route online, and it appears that my journey will cover some 269 miles and take me as much as 4 hours and 34 minutes. This is not a quick drive to the lake, this is a road trip.
Amazingly, and confusingly, the Minocqua area will be filled with Illinois license plates this weekend. As it is most every weekend. Filled with license plates and cars and families who, instead of driving an hour or so north, choose to drive 5 and a half hours north. As I’m noticing now, those are not easy trips to make. Those are definitely not the sort of trips you can make on a Thursday afternoon if you just can’t concentrate at work and feel the pull of your boat on such an overwhelming level that you simply must indulge yourself. That sort of drive is not to be taken lightly. Take it from me, since my brain is, in true Clark Griswold fashion, already reserving some brain cells that will needlessly be killed by spending four and a half hours in a car with my two screaming children. I love my kids, yes, but I hate driving in cars with them- particularly when the distance is so long, and the reward so mosquito-filled.
The day today will be a blur, and when I’m finally done dealing with the work portion of my day and all I want to do is sit in a white Adirondack chair and face the water with a Diet Coke in one hand and nothing in the other, I’ll instead be breaking land speed records in my car, burning unnecessary gas, trying to avoid speed traps set up by those blue State Patrol cars, all with the hope of arriving at my final destination before 9 PM tonight. Then, when I “rest” for two days, I’ll get to pack up the car and do it all over again, just in time to return to work on Saturday afternoon. And people do this every weekend? No wonder people who have owned vacation homes in locations other than Lake Geneva tend to not visit them as often as they should.
Stay tuned to the blog this week, as there’s no way to know what sort of, nor the great depths of “family fun” that almost certainly awaits me.