Beach substitute yields cheap vacation discovery

We were going to go to the Warren Dunes on Lake Michigan last weekend, just drive up for the day because we’re squeamish campers and the Holiday Inn Express wanted almost $300 a night, this being peak season and all. But then we heard about the E. coli trouble they’ve been having up there, and decided to do the beach thing at Mississinewa Reservoir instead -- which was much closer and much cheaper, when you consider that we were able to rent a cabin for less than the cost of a tank of gas.

I was afraid it would be boring. I couldn‘t get the idea out of my head that this big old “lake” was really, underneath it all, just flooded farmland (and at least one flooded town, Somerset, Ind., the ancestral hometown of my husband’s family). But the beach was really nice, and as the kids played in the water it suddenly occurred to me that while this body of water lacks the grandeur of the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico, the kids were basically having the same sort of fun they’ve had on tonier beaches.