Why I Will Never Buy a Cottage

One thing I learned this weekend was that if you hold a baby shower, say, at 4pm on a summer Sunday in Toronto, half your guests will arrive late because there was “bad traffic coming from the cottage.” This is fine with me because I don’t even need any guests to throw a rocking party. (Or a fun shower as the case may be. And also we still had plenty of guests.) So, yes, it’s fine with me, but why is it fine with you?

The perpetual certainty of bad traffic going both to and from the cottage is only one of several reasons why I will never, ever, not even if I win the lottery, want anything to do with owning a cottage. I’m not trying to disparage anyone else’s lifestyle choice. (Or is it less of a choice and more like you’re just born that way, like homosexuality? I don’t understand how cottage people work.) I’m simply trying to point out that backwoods Ontario might not be the slice of paradise you think it is.

Let me break it down for you:

Yes, the traffic. It’s impossible to overstate how horrible the traffic is. You leave work on Friday, just like everybody else. You try to get everything ready the night before and duck out of work a couple hours early so you can be on the road before 4pm. So does everybody else. You sit in hours upon hours of traffic every Friday night, all summer long, and then you turn around on Sunday evening and do it again.

The work. And the reward for all of that stop-and-go on the highway? You get to spend hours loading and unloading your car and setting up the kitchen and the bedrooms and cooking all your own food and then cleaning up after yourself. And that’s just a regular weekend! Don’t forget that you also have to open it up at the beginning of each cottage season and then close it down again in the fall. And this is all on top of the regular headaches that go into maintaining any piece of property all year round.

The money, honey. The average price for a modest cottage anywhere within easy striking distance of Toronto is roughly the same as my actual house. Add the cost of utilities and maintenance and all the gas you burn inching your way back and forth and that’s a quite the pretty penny. Then top that off with the cost of equipping yourself with top-of-the-line locks and rifles and hatchets to protect yourself from psycho killers that prowl the wilderness looking for unsuspecting city dwellers to slaughter. Have none of you ever watched a horror movie?

Which brings me to my next point: Cabin in the middle of nowhere. After investing all of that time and money and work into setting up your cottage for the weekend? What’s the reward? Sitting on some dock, listening to the sound of nothing and getting eaten alive by black flies, that’s what. Maybe if your lucky you’ll get to splash around in some murky lake water. Watch out for the jagged rocks and slimy seaweed! I hear that there’s not even wifi in cottage country. NO WIFI. Let that sink in for just a moment. Remember to breathe.

I know, I know. I can hear you already. “But we LIKE the quiet and the nothingness. We LIKE spending quality time with our family and getting back to basics.” Fine. As I already said, I don’t understand how cottage people work. But even if I admit that it might possibly, potentially, hypothetically be nice to “get away from it all” every once in a while, there are other options.

You could rent a cottage for a few days every summer to get a taste of that Ontario hinterland experience for tiny fraction of the cost of owning one. That should be enough to make you glad you didn’t invest your last half a million on some lakeside shack without any freaking wifi. And you don’t need to stay in the exact same plot of nowhereville either! Rent a wooded cottage near Napanee one year, Georgian Bay bungalow the next and cabin in Wasaga the year after.

“But, Rebecca, I still have this half a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket!” Okay, I understand. You’ve already paid off your house and your car and all your other debts. You’ve got an ample fund to pay for your children’s education and weddings and down payments or anything else they might ever need. You’ve invested wisely, planned for your retirement, given to charity and bought all the shoes your heart desires. What else are you going to do with all this extra money?

For the price of a cottage, you could plan a vacation to a different, exotic location every year. Paris! Rome! Bombay! Shanghai! Buenos Aires! Vegas! Wherever! I know again. I keep naming cities. (You could also do one of those all-inclusive beach resort things too, I guess. That’ll be a topic for another post.) But hey, I hear there are natural wonders outside of Ontario, too. The Australian outback or the Grand Canyon or the Rockies or the African savannah, for example.

But perhaps I’m missing something? Is there some really great thing about going up to the same cottage over and over again for the rest of your life that I’m not aware of? Or are cottage people and, er, non-cottage-world-adventurer kind of people just intrinsically different? Tell me!

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