The last real weekend of the summer is in the books. And, if you judge only by how tired I was last night, it was a good one. Fortunately by nearly every other measure it was indeed a fine way to wrap up the summer.

It’s become a tradition that our KC friends the Belfords come into town this weekend. They stay with our local friends the Heberts, and on Friday night we go to the local high school football game. We did not get a good result, so let’s not say any more about the actual game. The remnants of Harvey were pushing into Indiana, making it a cloudy, breezy, cool night, more like October than Labor Day weekend. Luckily the rain stayed just to the south of us so we at least stayed dry.

Saturday we stayed in Indy and took all the kids downtown to hang out at the Labor Fest and then the official Purdue tailgate before their game against Louisville. Bounce houses, face painting, balloon animals, and a beautiful day made it solid way to spend the afternoon.

Sunday it was down to the lake for the final time this season. We hadn’t been down for a month so it was a bit odd driving through the roads that split corn fields with the corn now being up above your eye level. Where back on Memorial Day weekend you could see the fields spreading out for miles, now it was like driving through a tunnel.

We’ve had some cool nights lately, so the water was a little chilly. It didn’t stop the kids from having lots of fun. There was the normal tubing and kneeboarding, kayaking and paddle boarding, and running around on the Lily Pad and lounging on the floating island.

Then, sadly, when we packed things up yesterday we began breaking a few things down for the year. The floating island was deflated. The hammock came home with us instead of being stored in the shed. We grabbed all the condiments out of the fridge. While we will likely take a boat ride on our next visit, whenever that is, it’s unlikely anyone will be back in the water.

The lake part of the summer was very good. I think we got a good return on our investment of building the new boat house and deck. It made our space a lot more useable, kept the boat cleaner, and generally made our shoreline look a lot nicer. We packed a lot of fun into this year, had a lot of great guests, and hopefully have a lot of great memories of everything we did in our eight weeks down there. As always, I’m wishing we had been able to squeeze another weekend or two in. I’m becoming more-and-more a fan of the Michigan school schedule, where they go a couple weeks into June and then don’t start the new year until after Labor Day. I’d gladly trade June weekends for August weekends at the lake.

Fall has been giving us hints for a few weeks. Although August was fairly warm and very dry, the nighttime temperatures have already been cooler for several weeks. Yesterday we bumped back up near 90, but tomorrow we’re only supposed to be in the low 60s. Morning lows are going to plunge into the 40s a couple times this week.

Yes, summer is over and fall, with its changing leaves and football and pots of chili and the distant glow of the holidays, is here.