The real excuse, or at least the one that was supposed to keep us from rioting, was that our very own Disneyland—basically just as good, but without all those pesky lines and stifling crowds and uninhibited fun—was just a two-hour drive away in sunny, breezy, coastal southern Michigan, home of the crumbling American auto industry and boundless amusement for children of all ages.

When you live in “the greater Chicagoland area”—a bullshit name for those parts of Indiana, Wisconsin, and suburban Illinois that have absolutely no right referring to themselves as Chicago but need some semblance of an identity to cling to, God bless them—you are fed a constant onslaught of commercials on television advertising the majestic forested hills of Michigan as the one true vacation destination. This is, of course, entirely absurd. Not to shit on Michigan, but there are far better vacation spots in the Midwest alone. And sure, Michigan’s got gurgling brooks and crisp lakes full of fish bigger than grown men and miles upon miles of fresh forests, or some garbage like that. But Wisconsin’s got the Wisconsin Dells, the water-park capital of the world, according to the brochure, and no child wants to hang out around a babbling river—unless you’re a character in Bridge to Terabithia and you wanna die—especially not when that babbling river is one state away from the largest indoor water park in the United States.

But my uncle’s family owned a cottage in Michigan, a small house on a tiny lake about fifteen miles inland from Lake Michigan proper. And apart from the month’s worth of supplies my mother insisted on purchasing for a week of vacation, going to Michigan was basically free, at least compared to Disneyland. And so, every summer, instead of contracting ringworm in a communal men’s shower somewhere in the bowels of Wisconsin like a normal midwestern family, we’d pile into a sedan—my mom, dad, brother, and me, along with the dog and our turtle, Cornpop, who traveled in a damp bucket between my brother’s legs—and drove two hours to the town of Sister Lakes, where the paradise of small-town Michigan awaited.