I spent a long weekend in the mountains with my parents at our family cabin. The cabin is about 30 minutes, not more, outside of Walla Walla. In fact, it's a mile into Oregon on a gravel road. There's no cell phone coverage and ours is the only cabin on the lane with electricity.

My great-grandfather built the main cabin and a much smaller sleeping cabin in the 1920's out of wood that was left over from a project at the family creamery. They picked the land for the cabin based on the fact that my great-grandmother had spent her teenage summers on Mill Creek with her aunt on an adjacent piece of land.  When they built the cabin there was no bridge and one had to ford the creek in his car.

In fact, my great-grandmother told stories of sitting on the cabin side of the creek as a teenager with her cousins and laughing when men from town would get suck on a large rock that one couldn't see from the car but that would bottom the car out in the creek. Locals knew about this rock and knew where to drive to avoid it. <em>Everyone else</em>? Well, they got stuck and then were forced to get out of their cars and into the creek in order to push it off the rocks while my great-grandmother and her friends giggled. Teenagers never change, do they? Even in her 90s when she'd tell this story there was still a hint of the impish-trickster and teenage amusement in her voice and a sparkle in her eyes in recounting these events.

Anyhow, today the cabin is more or less as it was when it was built. There are still screen windows, we heat the cabin with wood and the point of  going up to camp is to escape the heat and relax. The only thing is that a nearly 100 years later, the cabin is no longer as young as it used to be. It needs a new foundation and some serious TLC so that it can last another 100 years. It'll be a big project but this way our kids will also be able to tell stories about they hi-jinks they got into at the cabin as well.