Two Weeks in August

This was my view last week.

For the past seven summers we have taken a vacation with my sister and her family. The first two years we rented a house in Lake Tahoe. It was fine, it was fun, but it wasn't a vacation that we talked about the rest of the year.

Tahoe in the summer time is just not my thing. The water in the lake is freezing. It's near impossible to find a place to rent with a private boat dock. I don't really feel like I'm "away" in Tahoe. Too crowded. Too many strip malls. Tahoe is beautiful, and I realize it offers all kinds of activities geared toward all kinds of interests. Fancy restaurants and all, it felt like my same life, in a prettier location.

My brother-in-law suggested we try Bass Lake the next year. This year was our fifth year renting a house in the same little cove right on Bass Lake. My kids talk about how much they are looking forward to it all year long. We have endless stories and inside jokes that have come out of this trip. This year was no exception.

Even though the house we rented this year was a little dumpy. The couches sort of gave me the creeps. They all had a round grease (?) spot at the top. On one chair the spot had eaten right through the leather. There was the faint smell of cat litter throughout the whole place, but the smell was most pronounced right off the kitchen. Every light bulb seemed to be burnt out. There was carpet in the bathroom (who does that? in a lake house?).

But it didn't matter because we spent very little time in the cabin. To be able to tell my daughter to go jump in a lake, open the back door and...

Priceless.

The water in Bass Lake is perfect. Just cold enough to be refreshing in the 90 degree weather, but not so cold that you need a wet suit to water ski. There are no fancy restaurants, just a family run Mexican restaurant that serves amazing tacos, and combination bakery/pizza/ice cream shop, both within walking distance from our cabin.

It's an old-fashioned lake vacation, where moments like this are talked about all year long.

For our second week of vacation, my view has changed to this.

For the past three years we have spent the week after Bass Lake in the same rented house in St. Helena with my husbands parents. It's a fancy house, with a fancy pool and a fancy view. We force our kids to eat in fancy restaurants and visit fancy wineries. Yes, we are that couple who have the nerve to take their kids wine tasting (more on that later).

But mostly we spend our days doing this.

It's the kind of house where I can open the back door and tell the kids to get lost in the vineyards and they come back half and hour later with fresh picked wine grapes, blend them up with a little sugar and create their own "wine."

We've created for us the perfect same two weeks in August that we'll repeat for a very long time. One week in a dumpy little house on a gorgeous gem of a lake where my kids will eventually learn to water ski, where we can throw all five kids in one room to sleep, where the two youngest cousins can have a dance party on the dock and all of them can say that's where they caught their first fish, where we can spend a day showing our kids why Yosemite is such a magical place and each year we make it just a bit further to the top of Vernal Falls.

And one week in a house much fancier than our own where my husband can teach our kids about his love of wine and good food, they can ride their bikes through the vineyards, I can teach them how to execute the perfect cannonball into the pool and my son can eat an entire slice of the Campfire Pie he has been talking about since May.

It's my favorite two weeks of the year.