Tag Archive | fun with language

Weekend Blog: Woodstock, Cabins

This past weekend was one of those lovely good-friends good-food good-adventures damn-am-I-tired weekends where we drive to Troy (near Albany, about a 3.5-hour drive because, in NY, you can’t go straightanywhere if you’re below the Thruway. It’s more like — go east-southeast to get to Ithaca, travel southerly with east for a while to go below the lakes, travel around some hills for a bit while heading mostly east, and then head north-northeast for a while on a highway (Expressway? Fast multi-lane divided road with limited access but no tolls).)

In the midst of this lovely weekend — a trip to Woodstock (Which is not where the concert was held but likes to pretend it was, a fun little shopping town that would have seemed like it had a lot of head shops, did I not live in Ithaca), a drive through the Catskills, a quest for forks — we ended up discussing the regional variations on some seasonal-access dwellings.

“Oh, it’s all cute little cottages,” I started — in about the center of the Catskills, as far as the map says, not far from where we saw the World’s Biggest Kaleidoscope a few years back — and was told that around here, they’re called bungalows.

Thus began an interesting circle of discussion: T. and I are from the Great Lakes; K is from the Catskills; E is from Maine. To me, a cottage is a generally seasonal-use privately-owned dwelling on the water. To E., it’s a camping feature. (E calls what I call a cottage a summer home). To K, a bungalow is a seasonal-access rented no-foundation building in the mountains — I’d call that a cabin.

(Add to the mess that log cabin is its own thing, and I spent from 5 years old ‘till I moved out living in a log cabin my parents built from a kit.)

The building I’d originally started this conversation with said cottageto me because of its small but sturdy size, small yard, and cute shutters, by the by. Maintained, clearly, but only used once in a while.

So what about where you’re from? If there’s that much variation within the NE of the US, I’m curious about the broad span of the rest of my readership.

What’s a small home you own but live in or visit part of the year?

What’s a building in a campsite you can stay in rather than tent camping?

How about a rental you stay in for a week or two on vacation?

Does the physical location of these (water, woods, camping, mountains) change the term?

Bonus: what does “log cabin” bring to mind?

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