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Our annual summer camp budget funded a new kind of adventure.
Growing up in the Midwest in the 1990s, summer vacation meant three sticky months sprawled on a bath towel in the driveway. While my mother worked as a secretary at a racetrack, my brother and I were left mostly on our own. After we’d had our fill of pudding pops and daytime TV, we’d beg our grandmother to take us to the community pool or wander through the concrete drainage culvert we called a “creek.” Summer was mosquito bites and boredom, sunburns and scraped knees.
By the time we were my own children’s ages—6 and 8—we had permission to ride our bikes alone to the local rec center, where a handful of teenagers handed out board games and occasionally supervised what passed for arts and crafts. And then there was that one ill-fated week at sleepaway camp, where I nearly died of heartbreak watching my then-undiagnosed sibling get mercilessly teased. Sure, my mother made some effort to keep us occupied, but for the most part, summer—like much of my childhood—was defined by a certain benign neglect.
I assumed my own children would inherit some version of my experience—not the neglect necessarily, but the freedom of long, unstructured days. Instead, modern childhood arrived with registration deadlines, waitlists, carefully curated activities, and camp schedules so elaborate they resemble corporate conference itineraries. Whereas nobody expected anything of my mother beyond keeping us alive, I was tasked to educate, enrich, and endlessly entertain. From coding classes to mini Shakespeare theater, it all felt obligatory.
I was prepared to swallow my skepticism and sign the registration forms, until my husband and I added up the cost of summer camp for our two children. The total came to nearly $18,000. For roughly the same amount of money, we realized we could rent a luxury Airbnb and extend our annual vacation for the entire summer.
So that’s what we did.
When it comes to summer camp sticker shock, my husband and I are hardly alone. Across the country, camp fees have risen sharply, transforming what was once a middle-class rite of passage into a major household expense. For families of children with disabilities, the costs can be even higher. My son has special needs, and we’ve been told he would need one-on-one support to participate in certain programs—an accommodation that can add thousands of dollars to an already staggering bill.
Our decision to turn our camp budget into a summer-long vacation was made easier by the fact that our lease was ending and we were still several months away from closing on a new home. Since we were going to be “between houses” anyway, it was tempting to think bigger. We fantasized about spending the summer abroad—perhaps in Sri Lanka, where my husband’s family lives and where, for roughly the cost of our monthly mortgage, you can rent a guesthouse complete with a private chef.
For nearly the same price as the accommodations we ultimately booked, we could have signed another year-long lease, or we could have settled for one of the more reasonably priced short-term options we considered, like a cramped four-room apartment with no access to the backyard. Instead, for a couple thousand dollars more per month, we rented a magnificently restored Victorian cottage perched on the cliffs of the Palisades in the aptly named village of Grand View-on-Hudson, just outside Nyack, New York.
The 1860s estate sits smack dab between our hometown of Nyack and the equally quaint village of Piermont. It’s a three-bedroom, three-bath cottage set deep in thick hardwood forest, steps from the Esposito Trail, a rails-to-trails path that winds through a string of parks and scenic overlooks along the Hudson. What really sells it, though, are the unobstructed east-facing views of the river—including a sweeping vista of the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, a three-mile, twin-span cable-stayed structure that hangs in a pale geometric line against the sky by day and transforms into a luminous, slow-pulsing light illumination after dark.
The place was close enough for playdates, far enough to feel completely of another world.
At our summer home away from home, my children have their own bedrooms and bathroom, complete with a soaking tub overlooking million-dollar views. I have a fully renovated chef’s kitchen that opens onto a veranda where I drink my morning coffee; two fountains anchor a multilevel garden that produces freshly cut flowers for every room. There are plenty of spaces to work from home—but whether we actually will remains to be seen.
Initially, I wasn’t sure it would work—and I’m still not entirely sure we won’t lose our minds (or our jobs) once my son’s extended school year commences at the end of this month. But so far, it has felt almost magical. Boredom was my biggest fear, but simply relocating for the summer has been enough to pull our kids away from their screens and back into a more imaginative, independent way of spending their days.
Rather than having to lead them in activities, within the first week, the kids came up with the idea themselves to commandeer a pile of forgotten bricks into the base of an elaborate stick fort. Forget horse camp or cheerleading—my children’s favorite activity is sliding down a steep dirt hill. We all have poison ivy, they are covered in scratches, and I’ve pulled off more than one tick. But it all seems worth it when my daughter resurfaces from a morning lost in the garden, or she and her brother come tumbling into the mudroom, laughing uproariously and covered head to toe in burrs.
However, the best part, by far, has been the return of family dinners. Life gets busy, but nothing feels more essential than eating together alfresco, mesmerized by the far-off traffic streaming across the bridge as eagles circle overhead.
The longer I’m a parent, the more I realize how much of what we do is shaped—consciously or not—by our own childhoods. It can be easy to become obsessive about getting everything just right, but I’ve learned that what you do—or don’t do—matters far less than the attention and care with which it’s done. Whether they’ve spent hours at a pricey nature camp or an equal time wandering the natural environment surrounding a historic house, “just right” may not be so hard to get right after all.
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
