Vacation Lifestyle

Remember long vacations that seem to take you away from everything you knew, but always brought you back after weeks of happiness and forgetting? Where every problem you ever seemed to have was suddenly taken away when you got to this place? Well how would you feel if you moved to your happy vacation place? Not for a week or for just a month, but for the rest of your life. The sunsets and the magical days there become your life and the people who were once just friendly faces become your neighbors. The truth is, moving to your sacred vacation spot is hard to live through, but in the end, you learn to love the place more so as a home from then on and believe me, I would know.

When I was just about to start middle school (6th grade), my parents gave my brother and I the news that we would be moving away from the big city and going to Door County, which had always been our weekend get-away since I could remember. The news was shocking but at the same time it seemed different and unrealistic. We had spent almost every summer there in the beautiful tourist area and we even had our own vacation house. But it wasn’t exactly that which seemed to rock my pre-teen mind, but it was the fact we were moving from an area of big cities every way you drove, to the middle of nowhere that seemed to attract people yearly. As moving took place and I came to the place where everyone grew up with each other, I found out that fitting in was harder than it looks. I know how it feels to have a new kid come from nowhere and come to your little school which is pretty much like your own family, but never did I ever think I would take that spot. Moving to Door County brought me to that exact spot. To save you all the boring happenings of a girl in middle school and all the useless drama that all makes us somewhat mature, freshman year came sooner then I thought.

After the few years I lived in Door County, I got to know people better and better, but to tell the honest truth, no matter how long you’ve lived in a place, you are not going to be “one of them” ever. You moved there and you probably will not fit in as well as someone born there. But, people do start to become like family and the whole community is safe. What I’ve learned from such a strange move from a city to the middle of nowhere is that when I lived in a city, I would walk down a side walk and see tons of faces, but only occasionally would I know someone. But, as soon as you move to a place like Door County, every eight out of ten people you see you know and the other two are just tourists.

There is so much you learn from moving that you can hardly ever explain to people either. I could never explain how thankful I am to move to the middle of nowhere. You learn a lot of life lessons from having people so close to you and everyone is a helping hand and a friendly face when you need them. At first, moving to your number one vacation spot is extremely hard to handle, but as time moves on you start to re-fall in love with it all over again. The sunsets, the beautiful colors in the fall, just everything makes living there magical. I would never regret moving, though at the beginning it was rough trying to fit in. Maybe sometimes moving to your sacred vacation spot is a mistake, but in my life, it wasn’t. It made my old home my new vacation spot and my vacation spot my new home.

Katelaine “Katie” Buske is finishing her freshman year at Gibraltar High School. Katie’s move to her “vacation home” in Fish Creek four years ago has allowed her to live the dream in the arts, from creative writing to painting to music. Katie’s art has been displayed in different varieties and hopes to do journalism in the future.