How to Reunite with Relative Ease

Here's an interesting Encyclopedia.com statistic: every year, approximately 200,000 family reunions take place across the U.S. Our annual 2025 Lake Blue Ridge Family Week qualifies as such, with attendance numbers peaking at twenty-four members, ages 5 to 94 (excluding dogs).

Most family reunions last two days or less. Ours can span an entire week, which means, as a co-director of basecamp, I typically start falling apart between day three and four. But for reasons I'm about to explain, even the lightening strike that fried our Starlink router didn’t steer me completely off the rails. The physics of “Family Week” are real and challenging, but after a decade trying to figure it out, I’ve determined three actions that help everyone reunite with relative ease.

Adopt the reunion Mindset. Family WEEK is not family VACATION.

One of my husband's many mantras is, "It's all about the brain." Yes, you are taking precious PTO, and typically that means warm sand and calm ocean waves with someone you don't have to talk to handing you a margarita that you didn't have to climb forty-five steps to achieve on your own. But if you head into Family Week with any notion of "chill," then you will be level-five disappointed. Get over it. There will be no chilling at Family Week.

Instead, we engage. We make, eat, and clean two meals a day, then we hike, bike, float, boat, fish, swim, paddle, tube, ski, swing, and game—every single day. It is crucial, especially for the introverted participants, to accept that there will be almost constant interaction, but for taking a kayak down the creek (an acceptable outlet), sneaking away for a nap (very much frowned upon), or a whole night's sleep (mandatory). But don’t sleep too late, you may miss out on morning exercise followed by sourdough biscuits and sausage.

Assign Meal Teams

There are those who clean kitchens and those who “prefer not to get in the way.” In a world without a plan, midweek, the chronic cleaner may start picking fights and throwing pans. No longer! Instead, a team is responsible for planning, executing, and cleaning up the entire day's meals. How you assign the days and teams is up to you: by house, family, gender, birthdates. Our teams are multi-generational, which is a lot of fun. Uncle Gene directs the boy team with a pre-game huddle and handwritten instructions like Hoosiers meets The Bear. We girls drink Rose and collaborate more loosely, which is why the next day, I'll find the mushrooms I forgot to sauté. Regardless, when your team day is over, you are Scott-free to lounge and perhaps, momentarily, chill.

How do you keep from eating the same thing over and over? This year, we created a shared note where we logged our day and picks and then discussed how to manage all the chicken — chicken kabobs, lemon chicken, fried chicken, chicken quesadillas, and chicken salad. So much chicken.

Best of all, the food organizers no longer had to field circular questions about what was for lunch or dinner from the dozens. "Visit the note!" They said.

Create functional, organized spaces.

Our lake dock consists of two single-slip, unmatched numbers that we welded together. One has a top deck with lounge chairs and a hammock, and the other has a low-slope metal roof that does a great job sheltering our pontoon boat year-round from the weather. My daughter struggles with the space because it "lacks Feng Shui," which is a nice way of saying it's tacky. I love our dock because it's like a small house with lots of rooms and tidy cubbyholes for everything the masses need, but it’s form following function, for sure. We may not have a fancy dock, but we do have a dock box, hanging hooks, a shoe shelf, a tote yard, a boat yard, a float yard, a garbage bin, and a paddle pen. For years, these increasingly well-planned nooks have kept us from tripping over Family Week.

We are fortunate to have a growing family, so this year, we made a capital investment in Family Week by adding a small, covered pavilion we call the Redneck Yacht Club Bar and Grill. It's just a gangway away from the floating dock action, with a grill for hot dogs and stairs down to the water for thee same (hot actually dogs, get it).

Why would we invest in more space over a fancier, matching dock? The first Kentucky Derby had 10,000 fans in attendance. One hundred fifty-one years later, Churchill Downs, for one day a year, mind you, has space for 165,000 people. They've spent a fortune. I'm not suggesting you spend a lot of money, but the Churchill example is apt in a metaphorical sense. They invest in expansion because that one weekend of horse racing, the Kentucky Oaks and Derby, supports the entire organization for the rest of the year.

Family reunions are a commitment to that same, enduring support. The "spreading out of families" is real. Our transnational Family Week group represents eight different states, excluding colleges (which would add two more). Yes, we have the Fam Jam and True Pride text strands, which feature funny memes and happy birthday cake emojis, but physical contact only occurs a couple of times a year and in smaller, more intimate groups.

Family Week is not a vacation. It's more like attending, planning, and playing the World Cup of Quality Time. It's hard work that requires dedication, core strength, and a solid organizational chart, but Family Week is worth it because we get to know each other again, really get to know each other. We REUNITE, and that means we stay together no matter how far apart.