My favorite summer memories all involve boats and water! We lived in upstate New York when I was a kid. We had a boat and took it out every chance we could. My dad and Uncle Jim rented a cottage (the same cottage every year) for 3 weeks every summer at Sodas Point (on Lake Ontario). We would fish off the dock, go swimming at the sandbar, go swimming off the dock, and just cruise around in the boat. Every night my dad would walk us down to the little ice cream shop to get ice cream. We always knew where we were going but my dad would simply say "who wants to go for a walk?" Then when we got down to the corner (where the ice cream shop was) he'd say "I'm running on empty, I needs some gas (or sometimes steam) to get me back home." The ice cream was the gas to get us back home.

When my dad was working and we weren't out in the boat with him my mom would take us to our friends' house on another lake. It was over an hour from our house so we'd usually spend a night or 2 there nearly every week.