Maston Lake – In Michigan, you are never more than six miles from a body of water, whether an inland lake, river, or Great Lake. So why are Michiganders set on traveling for hours for a cottage getaway?
The short answer? They haven’t looked to find paradise in their backyard.
The perfect cottage is less than an hour away. There’s no reason for Michiganders to leave their home county to find a lake to call their summer home. Oakland County, for example, boasts 358 lakes, the most saturated county in the state. Yet eastsiders surge Up North, and while Torch Lake has the allure of crystal clear blue waters, the 250-mile drive can be nauseating.
By buying or renting a cottage close to home, you can have the perfect summer weekend schedule, impossible with cottages three, four, or even five hours away.
With a cottage close to home, you can leave at 5 p.m. and squeeze in a boat ride before dinner. With 9 p.m. sunsets across the state in June, there’s plenty of time for a bonfire. And on Saturday, you can wake up on the lake, ready to fire up the boat for a hot day on the water.
But if your cottage is four hours away, the whole schedule is out the window. You arrive, barring traffic, at 10 p.m., and after unloading the car and getting settled, everyone heads to bed tired. While you might wake up on the lake, you’ll spend the morning getting over travel fatigue.
So many inland lakes downstate, or close to home, are hidden gems. My family cottage is 45 minutes from our front door and on a private lake, just under 150 acres.
We still feel like we are on vacation when we drive out to the lake, and we are often able to extend the vacation beyond the weekend. With the cottage located in the same county as home, both of my parents can work from the cottage, and my brother and I were both able to keep up with our summer activities and jobs growing up, with our cottage as our home base.
Lake fun is no longer just on the weekend, and Tuesday boat rides are frequent.
Even better, we were able to find a lake with a sandy bottom and crystal clear water, where we ski and wakeboard to our hearts’ content, less than an hour from home.
People say you can’t have it all, but they just haven’t looked hard enough.
Lake life is deeply ingrained in Michigan culture, and while everyone has their preference of Great Lakes beaches, to boating on an inland lake, to tubing down a river, there is no reason any of those activities require a four-hour drive.
Find a nearby lake. Summer fun doesn’t have to stop at 5 p.m. on Sunday.
Kamden Mulder is a reporting fellow for Michigan Enjoyer.
