The last phase of the summer odyssey was our Caseville trip for our annual vacation/family reunion, which has been a regular occurrence since 2015. On July 29th, we left the area near Tawas City in Michigan to head to Caseville, and, to get on the road as quickly as possible, we used Google to calculate the fastest route.

We stopped on the way to Caseville at Bay City, which was the most “city” place yet of the places we had been with city in the name.

Bay City actually had several grocery stores, so we pressed our packing luck by stocking up as much as we could.

On the famous Michigan Hand Map, Caseville is at the tip of the thumb.

One issue we would have to confront at this Caseville vacation was that we didn’t quite have enough cottages for everyone to stay on the same general location. Normally, we combined some of the cottages at Crews’ Lakeside Resort with the places the next lot over, Dale’s Lakefront Cottages to enable everyone in the family to stay together.

It turns out the Dale Ignash listed above was a criminal; you can read the sordid details here. All of the sudden, the odd features of Dale’s rental houses took on a more sinister quality, like the bedroom that can only be accessed through another bedroom, the bathroom with a window to nowhere, or the window below that went to another room, not outside.

As far as Dale’s home design goes, I’m going to apply Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Fortunately, we were able to do without without Dale’s questionably designed and criminally owned houses, and we found enough cabins for the entire family. Mrs. Crews had a brother-in-law who rented a home just one lot over. Unfortunately, in between the two Crews areas lay Dale’s cottages, and, in something out a bad stalker movie, while waiting to be sentenced, DALE WAS OUT OF JAIL AND AT HIS COTTAGES. That meant that we had to cross the no-man’s land of the Dale lawless zone if we took the shortest path from one Crews house to another.

In a way, the exciting dash across the quarantine zone was just what we needed to spice up the Caseville trip. The Caseville beach, in my opinion, lacks the excitement of the ocean. Sure, it meets the minimum requirements of beachiness by having both sand and water, but it is otherwise significantly less thrilling than crossing the Dale Ignash Land that Law Forgot between cabins.

Maybe I was spoiled by the 80+ degree ocean water near Hatteras, but with Saginaw Bay’s temperatures in the low 70’s this year, and with the air temperature often around the same temperature, there wasn’t even an inspiration to jump in the cold water. Plus, ocean swimming keeps you interested with the threat that a wave might pound you into the surf or a riptide that could end you.

Instead of worrying about waves, the main concern with our group at the beach where you will sit, due the spontaneous rearranging of seating that frequently occurs. We start with everyone setting up in a semi-circle of maybe ten people. But you know how cats will randomly decide to leave a room and then sprint away without warning? That’s how many of our Caseville beachgoers are. One minute, the beach will be full of people. The next moment, there are five empty chairs between you and another living soul. To make this situation even worse, the beach is so unexciting that the other living soul on the beach with you…

The only thing that you can hope for to generate some excitement on the beach is that some randomly wacky event will happen. Like when that one guy was wandering the beach with a shovel tucked down his ass crack while searching the beach with a metal detector.

Or when this ritual burial of a fish in a hole the kids dug on the beach occurred.

Otherwise, the most entertaining beach activity remains evaluating the sunset.

To break up the monotony of going to a sleepy beach and rating sunsets that occur with inadequate cloud cover, we went to a local go-cart place south of Port Austin. When we got there, an older lady was selling tickets, and she was unexpectedly and intensely angry. It was the kind of anger that isn’t targeted at any one person or group but at life in general, an anger so palpable that you could feel it from the twenty feet away in the form of a growing sense of dread, draining away your happiness like some kind of Harry Potter Dementor. I would have taken a photo of her to illustrate this clearly for you but, well, she was ANGRY. However, we live in a miraculous age of Artificial intelligence, and I did try to recreate the vibe of angry ticket person at go-cart place with a variety of AI interfaces. But at this point, the AI can’t adequately capture the dead eyes of someone who watches children drive in circles day after day or the irritability of someone who has to sell tickets to an adult who doesn’t have the good sense and American pride to make purchases in cash. No matter how many times I told the AI “even more anger” or “eyes that are even more dead and soulless,” it couldn’t capture the reality. This is as close as it could come.

Angry go-cart lady was just looking for a reason to be even angrier, so the last thing that you wanted to do was give her a legitimate reason to escalate her anger. But the diversity of our group, which combined ultra-safe drivers who go at the speed of a particularly indecisive Walmart shopper, hyper-competitive drivers who don’t even bother to put a foot near the brake peddle, and incompetent children who lurch drunkenly from one side of the track to another, made a confrontation inevitable.

The confrontation came when McKenna, who was locked in on “winning,” sideswiped McKinley into the go-cart “parking area,” which McKinley then drove through on her way back onto the track. Enraged to an absolutely volcanic level, angry ticket lady moved with surprising speed and agility for someone who looked like she had been selling tickets since before the moon landing, angrily grabbed the checkered flag and angrily waved it back and forth in order to announce, angrily, that this race was OVER. After the trauma of enduring ticket lady’s constant rage, we needed some comfort food in a place we would be appreciated.

As we did last year, this year we kept scheduled events during the vacation to a minimum, still recovering from the scheduling mania of two years ago. There was a scheduled dance party…

And we also fit in our traditional trip down the Pinnebog River. For most people this is a relaxing trip, and we avoided last year’s mistake of putting incompatible rowers in the same canoe or double kayak.

Putting two or three people who are constitutionally incapable of cooperative rowing in the same kayak or canoe, on the other hand, can be rage-inspiring.

This is what made Jason’s canoe performance so remarkable. He just kept plowing on with relentless speed like a motor on the back of the canoe, completely disregarding the things that had brought down earlier rowing teams among our extended family, like the zig-zagging path that results from uncoordinated paddling, rowing through tree branches protruding over the stream, and children dragging oars in the water while complaining that the boat was going too slow

Rounding out our scheduled events, we held our annual Caseville Talent Show. There is typically a wide arrange of talents on display, including a choreographed show, but this year was a stripped down, briefer version.

One thing became clear over the course of the talent show: while everyone had talent, the most important person in the show was Jesse. Not only did he accompany most of the acts…

…he took the “song” below and miraculously transformed it into something musical.

It could be that the talent show was scaled back this year because there were almost nightly displays of talent at the bonfire area.

Mostly, the talent was musical in nature, but there was one night where nine-year-old Julia demonstrated her talent for persuasion by compelling these people to tell stories of their favorite times at Caseville.

By Thursday, the Caseville vacation was winding down, and, to commemorate the vacation, Rita planned a family picture. As it turned out, asking for a “family picture” was confusing because everyone at our Caseville cabins was family in one way or another. That led to an awkward scene where we had to tell other family members that they weren’t wanted for this family photo.

Finally, we had an arrangement with only the good family members.

Or did we? Apparently, Laura was overzealous in kicking family members out of our family photo, which is how McKinley didn’t make it into the picture below, of the older two generations of this particular branch of this particular family.

But maybe McKinley was better off not being photographed with this family.