On July 27th, we left the Traverse City area to head across Michigan to Caseville for the annual vacation with Laura’s mom’s side of the family. Before we left, we split up the group, with Mark leaving the Interlochen house early to go to his high school reunion, so I was taking his kids plus McKenna across the state in one small, packed CR-V.

Actually, trading Laura for three children resulted in the quietest ride I’ve experienced in years thanks to a ready supply of junk food and the blessings of smartphone addiction. After an uneventful drive, we arrived at our Caseville house at around three and unpacked. Most of our Caseville group was staying at the Crews Cottages, while the place Laura and I were staying at was separated from the other houses by properties owned by the Dale Ignash crime syndicate. However, unlike last year, Dale was actually in prison, so we could cross the Dale Land that Law Forgot without much worry to see who else had arrived.

We made it across and found that Peggy had arrived and begun unloading an entire carload of snack foods and games, prompting several of the children to move into this island of safety from responsibility and the oversight of their parents.

Another factor in the kids’ decision to stay at Peggy’s cottage as much as they possibly could was the super hard water at the place we were staying. There was so much sulfur in the water that the smell of rotten eggs was everywhere, especially after someone took a shower, which is exactly what you want after bathing. And the water in the toilets was yellowish, to the point that I was constantly asking myself, “Did I flush that?”

Traditionally, our Caseville group makes a concerted effort to organize activities during the vacation week, but that organizational effort was challenged when we tried to assemble a group text. The process of adding just the adults took approximately 7,926 texts to complete, and even then, we didn’t get everyone. To some degree, our difficulties came from Apple’s elitist messaging system, which still treats Android users like second-class phone users with their green bubbles. And partially it came from people sending sarcastic messages without the ever-necessary /s indicator.

It was a powerful lesson for us all, but eventually we were able to overcome many of our communication issues. But if technology was going to be so unreliable, there were proven communication methods pioneered on earlier Caseville trips.

The slide back to the organization and orderliness of earlier Caseville vacations was confirmed when a compulsory “Town Hall” meeting was called at the beginning of the vacation. Here, we were told the events that would be occurring in this week, and reminded of the rules and discipline that would be necessary for the week to be a success. As always, the audience listened attentively and respectfully to this presentation.

The Town Hall was less a model of democracy than the name would imply, and some Town Hall participants mistakenly believed they could shield themselves from the authoritarian messaging.

In fact, there was no safe space at this session. Not even in the back of the room, hiding behind behind the kid who doesn’t wear real shirts.

This same approach to running a Town Hall that left Tristen a hollow shell of his former self was employed at the Caseville relay races a few days later, where a pep talk crystallized the “have fun or else” message of the Town Hall.

The speech, intended to defuse the competitive instinct in our group, an instinct so powerful it led to the most cut-throat game of rock-paper-scissors the world has witnessed, nevertheless took on the tone of a different kind of motivational talk.

But maybe it is just about frickin’ damn fun. Let’s check with the relay race spectators:

In Rita’s defense, the level of inertia among Caseville vacationers at rest is substantial. Maybe she resorted to these motivational speeches because the Caseville group is the immovable object when they are at rest that continues to stay at rest, never, ever moving. The one exception to this principle of inertia is when someone returns from a dispensary and invites everyone to partake across the street, in which case the laws of physics are shattered as instantaneous, near-lightspeed movement occurs. Otherwise, however, there is inertia. For example, one of Michigan’s famous natural features, Turnip Rock, is near Port Austin, which is a 15 minute drive from where we stay.

As close as it is, since 2015, when we started visiting Caseville almost annually, we somehow have never visited Turnip Rock. To be sure, there are problems in getting to the Rock in addition to inertia, like the fact that all of the land near Turnip Rock is privately owned.

That means that the only way to reach Turnip Rock is by water, which the Michigan Supreme Court recently declared can’t be owned by Dr. Evil. Kayaking to the rock is about a 7 mile round trip, which is a lot of miles to kayak. But, after a whole lot of research, I determined that it was doable, and we got a group of 8 Caseville vacationers willing to give kayaking a shot. Then, doubts crept in. Choosing to kayak 7 miles is the kind of decision that is easy to make when the kayaking trip is weeks away, in the distant future. But when the trip was mere days away, some of our volunteers started to notice that their arms, which would be doing the paddling, had frighteningly little muscle mass or stamina for paddling. I myself started wondering if I hadn’t, in planning this kayaking trip and including Laura and McKenna, set the stage for an aquatic version of our disastrous Bubbles Hike. Fortunately for those in our group for whom the prospect of kayaking for 3-4 hours brought them face to face with their own mortality, the threat of thunderstorms caused the kayaking company to cancel our trip. Following this cancelation, having rethought the plan to kayak to the Rock, I made a second reservation, this time on a motorboat, but high winds caused this to fall through as well.

The Pinnebog kayak trip goes downriver about a mile and a half to a sandbar separating the river from Lake Huron. Apparently, the short trip provided insufficient excitement for the kids, who looked to take the thrills up a notch, climbing and jumping on a semi-stable ledge before running down the hill from the ledge and belly-flopping in the water. During the summer, I listened to an audiobook that explained how this kind of risk-taking actually helped kids understand their limits and not do stupid things in the future. We are still waiting on that outcome.

On the tamer side of things, Lake Huron was calm enough that almost everyone in the group was willing to wade out. While we were wading, Anne told the kids that the little fish they saw swimming around could bite the dead skin off their feet, because, why wouldn’t you tell kids that. Then, Anne began to panic that the fish were biting off too much skin, because, why wouldn’t you loudly announce this to kids surrounded by the fish. In the picture below, you can see our vacationers in the more innocent time when they were simply trying to spot the flesh-eating minnows, shortly before they were taken unawares by the notorious Lake Huron feet-devouring piranha.

In spite of flesh-eating fish, potential lake tsunamis, and speeches delivered with an intensity that triggers the “fight-or-flight” response in listeners, people did manage to have frickin’ damn fun.

Sometimes people had too much fun. On a vacation where pretty much all of the adults were drinking regularly, there was always someone at every gathering who nevertheless became “that person,” the individual who, no matter what everyone else’s level of sobriety or drunkenness, had managed to be several orders of magnitude MORE intoxicated. It’s the kind of thing that leads to this question being asked without preamble during a pre-dinner conversation: “Are you concerned about your prostate?”

In the spirit of the Olympic Games, which occurred in Paris at the same time as the Caseville vacation, people also watched competitions in sports that they would never otherwise be interested in. At Caseville, the Croquet Tournament of Champions attracted our nomadic vacationers, who, as they wandered from place to place with their chairs, chose to sit down to watch the non-stop croquet excitement.

The last time there had been a Caseville Croquet Tournament, a “best of three rounds” tournament abruptly ended after one round when one participant rage-quit after a poor first round. Bouncing back from that performance, Anne showed that she meant business in this tournament by choosing a black outfit designed to intimidate the competition.

Check that. Turns out this outfit was a swimsuit.

With no one to inform the croquet players that the tournament was about frickin’ damn fun, the competition became competitive enough that McKenna was recruited to video the event.

As everyone who has watched croquet knows, it is a fast-paced, um, sport, and the videos would help us catch things that might have been missed in real time. The thinking was that controversies could be resolved by consulting a replay of the questionable play. Did the ball actually go through the wicket? Was there a double-strike on that hit? Did I actually flush the yellowish sulfur-water in that toilet? There was only one way to be sure – time to go to the replay booth.

Ultimately, the tournament was so competitive that no one could pull away from the pack and win. There was only one solution to this problem: Mark had to keep adding additional rounds until he won the competition.

The same competitive spirit carried over to our go-kart expedition at the Port Austin Family Go Karts. An angry older lady running the go-kart place had moderated some of our competition last year, but this year, she had been replaced by two younger guys who were all about competitive go-karting. So when Mark once again added a round of competition and, for a second race, requested an upgraded go-kart to tilt the competitive advantage in his direction, they were happy to honor his request.

Even though the two guys running the place had shown that they did not care if drivers bumped each other or even if one driver wiped out another (they may have actually preferred it), the Tanner and McKenna failed to capitalize on this by employing aggressive zig-zagging tactics to prevent Mark from cruising to victory.

As always on our Caseville vacations, there were numerous displays of talent. There was the formal talent show, of course, but a new demonstration of talent was devised to expand on a development from last year, when Jesse help Julia turn a swimsuit song she invented seemingly just to irritate her brothers into this:

Building on that success, Julia, Jesse, and Liz wrote a song about our Caseville trips, to be performed during the vacation. To see who would be part of the team that would sing the song, Julia had the idea of holding tryouts for the Bassville Rockers. These tryouts would decide who made the “varsity” performing group and who would be on the sad JV team, incapable of making the first team on a vacation. Against all odds, someone prevailed on Julia to see that it would be bad form to humiliate friends and family by relegating them to the JV, and Julia pivoted during the tryouts, accepting all of the performers on the Varsity Squad.

While this announcement was unexpectedly diplomatic of Julia, an investigation into the scoring of the contestants told a different story.

The performances were sometimes scored much higher than 10, with the performance in the video below earning the highest score, a score which was not just 4 or 5 points greater than the highest score on the paper above – it was ONE HUNDRED TIMES GREATER.

The tryouts complete, several practices occurred, building to the show. The choreography, singing, snack-catering, and random juggling performances were synchronized, and by Wednesday, the show was on.

The show was a hit. McKenna, having experienced so many successful Caseville talent shows, shows that involved actual talents, had been misled a few years ago into thinking the same level of talent could be displayed at my family’s beach vacation. And then this happened.

But it could be Kyle and Andrew were just ahead of their time. Maybe they were just preparing their breakdancing performance for the Olympic level.

The talents of our Caseville group were also exhibited with a Fashion Show, which was announced using a laminated and sheet protectored sign.

The idea behind this event was that participants would pair up and design outfits for each other. The outfits would be purchased from the local thrift store, whose owner, recognizing that something was going on as an unexpected flood of customers bought crazy stuff, became aware of the show and commented to our buyers that all of the outfits purchased would go great with each other.

At the official show on Thursday, the fashions were finally unveiled.

Needless to say, when the array of animal print and pastel clothing available at a small-town thrift store is combined with the talent of the Caseville Crew, the results are sure to be amazing.

The show was frickin’ damn fun, both for our group and for the random strangers who happened to be outside during the parade of fashion.