My Backyard Vacation Spot

Ever wish your family vacation spot could be as far away as the sweet, simple steps into your backyard?  Well, I have the privilege and blessing to say, mine is.  I am a native “Lincolnite” and Nebraska has been home soil for many of my ancestors.  I live in the west part of town, down a little street to which I have become so fond, Laguna Road.  Driving by you won’t notice anything too extravagant about the neighborhood; we don’t all own $500K houses with the greenest fresh cut lawns saturated with the finest décor (if you’re looking for this, head south in town).  But what those neighborhoods lack, that ours makes up for, is a small private lake situated perfectly into our backyards. 

Spring Lake, as it’s formally known by, has provided me with the greatest childhood experiences of which I could have ever dreamed.  The greatest benefit of having a lake in your backyard, is that it’s constantly changing, changing with the seasons that this.  Summer is probably the best time to have a lake in your backyard.  We don’t wait in long lines and pay heaps of money to swim for a couple of hours in a chlorine saturated pool.  We hop into our trunks, race into the backyard, and plunge face first straight into an earthly, chemical-free lake.  After hours of swimming, the neighborhood kids and I would congregate to my backyard, where the biggest sandbox in Lincoln exits.  We would spend hours digging huge “damns” into the sand, filling them up with buckets of lake water, and creating “gates” to allow the water to flow back into the lake (we were mini-engineers).  “LEAK!” was always the code word for when one of the sandy walls would collapse, spewing water in all directions. 

Beyond swimming during the summer, fishing was also a recreation many of us neighbor kids excelled at.  Every summer when school got out, we would start our annual fish catching competition.  The name of the game, whoever caught the most fish that summer was crowned the Fishing Champ for the remainder of the year.  We even built our own fishing dock where we would spend all day and hours into the night catching fish after fish.

 This only scrapes the surface of my high pile of childhood memories spent on this beautiful, sentimental territory.  The lake has been entangled into my memory of home.  Many of my life’s great moments, learning and recreational, have been experienced at my vacation spot that’s located only a couple sweet, simple steps away.