A Killer Vacay You Won't Want to Miss ~ by Andi Lawrencovna

Photo: Google images

My family own camps in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York. Now, when I say “camps,” I really mean homes that are made out of wood and that we call “camps” but that are pretty high-end pieces of real estate – absent air conditioning. These cabins reside on the banks of a small lake. Not directly on the lake, but each house has a golf cart, and the lake is less than a half mile away from the front doors, so we say “on the lake” and no one really argues it.

I always loved/love going up to the cabins. It’s a yearly ritual that I feel incomplete without completing.

Of course, now days, I go with a bit more trepidation than when I was younger, but…it is what it is.

I should probably explain.

As a child, I was oblivious to anything else around me but Disney movies and my Barbie doll. When asked: “Where you going?” I would respond and walk away without waiting for the resulting questions or, as I now have come to expect, shock when I spoke my answer.

You see: “Where you going?” was answered with: “The camps in the Adirondacks.” “Oh, where at?”

“On Crystal Lake.”

Let me repeat…I’m oblivious, and I watch ONLY Disney movies…mostly.

But I definitely do NOT watch horror movies, and yet would routinely get a “horrified” expression in response to “Crystal Lake.”

As it turns out, Crystal Lake happens to be the setting for a horror

Photo: Google images

movie.

Jason, whichever one he is…I don’t really know, never watched it, you see?...is a serial killer who worked or lived or whatever-ed at Crystal Lake in Upstate New York…

Yes…MY Crystal Lake. The one where I spent an idyllic childhood completely unaware of the horror that had ensued there sometime during the 80s.

Because, despite the “Friday the 13th” movies being fictional, apparently most people believe that Jason really did commit those dastardly deeds up at Crystal Lake.

It doesn’t help that there really was a boy’s camp up there at one point…just like in the movies…

Oh, and that one of my relatives actually bought one of the dorm houses that the boys used to camp in and converted it into their cabin…

Okay, you caught me, all three of my relative’s cabins were originally boy’s dorms! FINE!

I have never once found a remnant of blood or gore or chainsaws or knives or the like anywhere near or around the camps…but it’s still the first question people ask when they put one and one together: “Crystal Lake? Like from the movie?”

Why oh why can’t it be a movie about a romantic heroine who gets caught up in a love affair and she and her lover escape to the camps where they defend themselves by growing giant mega-crocodiles that eat-- wait, that’s Lake Placid, never mind.

I’m getting them confused.

I should probably point out, though, that for the thirty plus years I have been going to the Adirondacks, I have never once met a serial killer nor been threatened by anyone except the gas station attendant who was not going to let me get a lotto ticket without seeing my ID.

Finding a place to get away from the everyday, to relax in nature, enjoy time with your family, that honestly is the moral here.

No matter that Crystal Lake has this invented history of horror, it

Photo: Google images

has been a place that will forever be for me linked with good times and great memories. It’s where my Babushka (not the scarf, this is the Grandmother) went down to the rec hall and because she had to use a walker, sat down in a chair and danced the night away all while sitting. This is where my uncles taught me how to fish, and I had more fun rowing the boat across the lake than learning how to bait a hook. It’s where we sat around one night before the bonfire and passed around a Kindle and read “Meg” to each other, because why the heck not? The voices were epic, and the story was fun. It’s the place that someday I hope I can take my kids, blocking their ears from whispered tales of men with axes, so that they can go to the lake and run in the sand. So my uncles can tell them “the water’s so clear you can drink it,” even as I know WAYYY better. It’s the place where on the 4th of July, we’ll pack up the cars into a caravan, making seats where there most definitely are not seats so we can take as many people as we can with us over to the Dude Ranch where they set fireworks off after the rodeo and the little kids can have hotdogs on the house because it’s a celebration and it’s family but way more than family too.

It’s a retreat, and it’s a home, and it’s a vacation, and it’s work.

It’s crazy, and the people there are crazy, just not serial-killer crazy.

And I wouldn’t change it for the world.

My family own cabins in the Adirondacks. We try to go up once or twice a year, usually at the beginning and end of summer. The waters of the lake are so clean you can see all the way to the bottom twenty feet below, and that’s why it’s called Crystal Lake. The people are friendly, though some are a bit standoffish, but they’re family, and it wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without traveling to that place where the internet doesn’t work, but the TV does, and someone’s always got some sort of game going and you go home more tired than when you got there because there’s something going on somewhere every minute.

I hope you get a chance to visit someday, just remember that if you hear noises in the woods coming after you in the night…

…it’s probably just a bear.