With the calendar turning to October, summer 2024 has officially closed out. It’s time to reflect and celebrate the “ta das” of summer (the flip side of the “to dos”).

In a mid-May post I outlined my six Great Lakes summer intentions – specific things I wanted to do by the end of the season. I shared that this is part of a strategy called design your summer that I’ve implemented for quite a few years after hearing about it on the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. Each year I have found that setting, and then often completing, my summer intentions makes the season more vivid and memorable. 

As of this post, I have completed five of my six intentions. The one that I did not get to – a trip out to one of my favorite lakefront parks, Lake Erie Bluffs – is on the calendar for this coming weekend, paired with taking the girls out for breakfast and buying pumpkins and mums, which abound in the counties east of us. 

Additional Great Lakes moments happened unexpectedly or spontaneously over the summer. See my post from August that shares a couple – the playful Great Lakes water table at the Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the gem that is Edgewater Beach in Cleveland on a sunny Friday.

Our family outing to see the sunset from the Solstice Steps in Lakewood Park will remain an exceptionally rich memory. Since moving to Cleveland in 2014, we have always loved this park. It has an enormous playground that both of the girls have always looked forward to visiting. On our very first visit to the park, likely in 2015, we wandered down to the waterfront and found the lookout at the furthest east point of the promenade along the water. It looks directly east at the downtown Cleveland skyline. My husband, who grew up on the east side of the city, said that it was a completely new view of the city to him. It’s amazing how we end up living somewhere and, for no fault of our own, often end up with informally drawn boundaries, angles, and perspectives from which we see and experience it.

We went on a beautiful night, although the sky was very clear and so the sunset was attractive, but not unique. Catching a good sunset is tricky. It’s some clouds in the sky that create the sweeping, radiant, glowing sunsets where light ricochets around the sky. For optimal sunsets, you are looking for mid-level and high clouds with 50% cloud coverage.

As we sat on the huge stone steps nestled into the hillside, we were surrounded by the sounds of people making summer linger – music, laughter, children playing during dusk. People were seated all around like an amphitheater, watching this minor miracle of each and every day. When the sun dropped below the horizon line, everyone applauded.

The curtain has dropped on the season, but we had a really great summer. It felt long and leisurely. Fall has been a pretty significant gear shift. Even when trying intentionally to not be overbooked, it often just happens. I miss the slower pace and am trying two strategies to keep some of that slower pace at other points of the year. One is blocking time on the calendar for rest. For example, there is a Sunday afternoon in October where I have blocked 2-6 as an afternoon of rest; I will not book other plans at that time. 

The other strategy is small adventure-big adventure, which is a permutation on content by the writer and podcaster Laura Vanderkam. I try to have one small adventure every week; this might be solo or it might be with the family. The scope of an adventure can be very modest – a walk at a park, a local event, coffee with a friend. I also try to have at least one big adventure each month.  The scope of this can also be fairly modest – one of our family favorites is to pair either a park walk and exploration with a meal out or in colder months perhaps a museum with a meal.  For the meals, we often look for a hidden gem that is new to the family. 

So, here’s to fall adventures! If you’d like to see a re-cap from my summer, check-out my Instagram reel posted this week.