The Traffic Jam

Many noble thoughts enter into the minds of those contemplating a vacation home purchase at Lake Geneva. If the contemplator had the good fortune to experience a taste of Lake Geneva as a youth, then nostalgia will be chief among those noble reasons. Other reasons factor in as well, some serious and worthy, others driven, and this will seem blunt, but some decisions are driven indeed by the desire to keep up with the Jones family across the street. You see them every Friday morning, and then you don’t see them until Sunday night. You see their paper in their driveway, taunting you, laughing at you. Their paper won’t be read until Sunday night, if at all. Meanwhile, you’re home on a Saturday, able to shuffle to the end of your drive to pick up your paper while their paper sits. The Jones family is at the lake and you are not, and this is your weekly, painful reminder. Keeping up with your urban or suburban neighbors is surely a reason some people buy a vacation home, but it’s not the only reason.

Some people, many times younger families who may be raising children in a steel and concrete world, wish to expose their kids to a different kind of environment. An environment where steel and concrete and mirrored glass facades are replaced with shingles and screen doors and grass. For a kid to indeed be a kid, sometimes they need a little more room to roam than the rec center on the 37th floor affords. I’ve had other clients purchase at the lake due in large part to their pets. Golden Retrievers were made to swim and fetch and run. These things are not easily accomplished without visiting a dog park, which resembles a true nature experience about as much as a zoo aquarium resembles the ocean.

But sometimes, reasons are not selfish and they are not nostalgic and they are not lifestyle driven. Sometimes, health is a concern. While many city dwellers do not like to admit that the air they breathe is different from the air I breathe, there is no debating this fact. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal went a bit further in explaining the affect that our environment can have on our health.

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New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence, and emotional stability.

This is heady stuff. The study goes on to claim that traffic congestion, and the resulting fumes, can have adverse affects not just on adults but on young children, even unborn children. Worse yet, according to a study by Texas A&M University, Chicago now owns the designation of most congested metro area in the country. Residents in the Chicago area wasted an additional 70 hours of their lives sitting in traffic during 2009. This is unfortunate and maddening and your synapses are begging for a reprieve.

Thankfully, there is a solution to this traffic headache and the potential adverse health effects it fosters. If seven days a week, living and breathing this toxic airborne mixture, is bad for you, then breathing this for just five days a week must be better. Right? There is something to be said for the emotional detox that can take place during a properly spent Lake Geneva weekend. There is rest for one’s mind and rest for one’s body. There is time to sleep and time to play and there is time to shape each weekend in exactly the way that you see fit. There is time to be spent with the kids, or without kids, and there is restorative power that comes from breathing clean air and swimming in cleaner water.

This coming Saturday, that hated newspaper will be thrown onto your neighbor’s driveway. It’ll sit there all day until it is joined Sunday morning by another paper whose fate it is to also be ignored. This will taunt you, as it always does, and remind you that a Lake Geneva weekend is better than your weekend. But this weekend, when thoughts of Lake Geneva flood your mind, make a point to stop fighting it. Submit to Lake Geneva for any number of reasons and your greatest reward may be improved health. And smarter children. And glossier hair.

About the Author

I'm David Curry. I write this blog to educate and entertain those who subscribe to the theory that Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is indeed the center of the real estate universe. When I started selling real estate 27 years ago I did so of a desire to one day dominate the activity in the Lake Geneva vacation home market. With over $800,000,000 in sales since January of 2010, that goal is within reach. If I can help you with your Lake Geneva real estate needs, please consider me at your service. Thanks for reading.

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