30 best summer activities

30 best summer activities, unranked:

• Starting with an unusual one: sitting inside or on a patio during a tremendous rainstorm, the kind when it gets really dark, like horror movie dark, and then all of a sudden waves of stinky rain just pours in sheets. That’s transcendent, and a great respite from the typically punishing heat of July.
• Seeing a baseball game and just really getting into it; getting crackerjacks, beer or a pop, a damn hotdog, the works! Having lousy seats and using that as an excuse to walk around the ballpark is a nice bonus activity. Obviously, you can see baseball in the spring, but usually its either too rainy or too cold, and you could see baseball late into the fall, but the teams I like usually suck. Part of the charm!

 

• Speaking of walking, man, what beats a nice hike in some woods or at a park. Water feature optional but preferred. 
• Swimming.
• Seeing a big, dumb, overblown outdoor concert. My best example of this was seeing Iron Maiden at the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in June 2008. Just a bunch of dumb idiots, my dear friends included, listened to dumb idiot loud guitar music on a warm night on a grassy hill. Bliss.
• Reading for leisure outside, either on a bench, or a chair, or even sitting on some grass. Great stuff. This is similar to
• having coffee outside on a bench, a chair, your porch, or in sitting in some grass, although the joy of summer coffee outside in the morning is that it’s a quiet moment where the cup is warmer than the air (which certainly will not last all day) so maybe the grass is a little dewy from the night prior. Anyway, this is an extremely important summer activity: it’s a small moment in an otherwise large world, and its all yours to savor before the day arrives.
• Let’s flip to the other end of the day. My wife put me on to this game, but there’s a delightful, almost perverse pleasure in going to bed while the sun is still out. I’m talking about one of those days when the damn thing is hanging tough after like 9pm, but wow, do you feel like you’re in charge of your relaxation when you tighten up the blinds and tell the sun it can kiss your ass, see you tomorrow.
• Listening to The Hold Steady’s classic album “Boys and Girls in America.”
• Going on a road trip: windows down, radio blasting your favorite songs, ideally all four seats full. You could be going to …
• … an amusement park to ride roller coasters.
• … a concert, rock and roll is the best in the summer because, after say driving several hours to Detroit from your college campus in central Ohio to see The Hold Steady (synergy!) and The Gaslight Anthem you think, well once we get outside I won’t be so miserably hot and sweaty and then you step outside and its like you’re still in the pit for the most wild song because even though its 10:30pm and you’ve got a 4 hour drive before you can fall asleep its hot as shit, but it’s the best kind of hot as shit you’ve ever felt. That’s summer.
• … see your in-laws and feel warmly included in a family tradition set in a town you did not grow up in (note: this works with close friends too, you don’t gotta get married to be in someone’s life). Best example: every year, Rachel’s Lollapalooza is a Steam Show in her hometown’s park which culminates in a parade of tractors, farm equipment, and steam machines literally driving around town. Her mom makes a spread fit for a king and for literal hours we sit in their grass and watch these ancient machines lumber around town, occasionally breaking down, starting back up, and plodding along. Spectacular. Okay, now I want to drop into a story that has quite a few summertime highlights, hang with me. As I remember it, the first summer after my mom was elected was 2000 (could have been 2001) and we got into a downright perfect routine with the newfound free time with our dad, who was traveling much less for work, to make sure we didn’t kill each other and burn the house down. Steve and I would
• wake up pretty early, before it got too hot, and walk our beautiful lab, Cheney, around the block. On these walks, we’d play a little game I liked to call
• “Poo-Wiz” where I’d take the bag of Cheney’s waste, tie it real tight, and throw it as high as I could. The tail of the bag would make a whizzing sound flying down. Poo – Whizz, get it? Great shit (literally)!
• When we’d get home, we’d immediately dive into the N64, and I remember like clockwork we’d fire up Star Fox 64, the all-time classic space rail shooter game, trading off levels. Steve was surgical on the tank mission, but I could hold my own in Sector Z. Together, we’d beat the game. By then
• Dad would be back from the grocery store and he always had 1 of 2 options for lunch: a Giant Eagle frozen pizza or thick sliced bologna and some nice Italian white bread to make Briar Hill steak sandwiches, not-so-hot peppers for the little guys. We’d sit together and eat in front of the tv while watching
• Family Feud or Battle of the Sexes on FX. Daytime tv during a smokin’ hot summer day is some of the best low-brain function entertainment you can get and I can’t recommend it enough. After cooling off from lunch,
• Brother and I would go ride our bikes in the woods, or ride to
• the public library to get books, watch music videos on Yahoo, or read about video game cheat codes in Prima guides and then go home. Endless, were those days.
  What else…
• bonfires with smores and hotdogs, lots of good summer cooking to be done,
• having a picnic is always pretty sweet, you got burgers, hot dogs, pasta salad, potato salad for folks who enjoy, beer, pop, lemonade, chips, all kinds of bees and ants trying to eat your watermelon. Lovely.
• Having a summer birthday is a bum deal when you’re in elementary school, but as an adult, a summer birthday is a great opportunity to do stuff like (2) seeing a baseball game or (10) a road trip with bros or
• having a Twister themed birthday party where your cake has a tornado on it and then a mid-august thunderstorm crushes the power at your house but your Uncle Bob got you a glow in the dark pocket watch so you run around showing your grandparents and aunts and uncles what time it is even though the power is out because your pocket watch shines like the lights behind your young eyes and everyone is young and alive and happy and there so its like the all-time best memory.
• The 4th of July because watching the classic disaster picture Independence Day is as good as any fireworks display, but also
• running around your small town to find the best vantage point to watch the fireworks display, but also running home to enjoy them with your family, no matter how old or “too cool” you are to look up and marvel at magnificent explosions in the summer sky.
• This is some inside baseball but the only thing better than watching a 4th of July parade is being in one, which I’ve had the distinct pleasure of doing many, many sweltering hot 4ths of July. No better way to show someone you love them than to commit to several miles of slow marching and handing out Tootsie Rolls while they melt in your melting hand on asphalt.
• Sleepovers where you go to sleep after the sun wakes up having watched some ungodly number of movies (usually 4) 2 of which suck, 1 is great, and the 4th you straight up slept through. Walking home from your pal’s house, disoriented, eagerly meeting your parents for breakfast. We gotta normalize adult sleepovers so I can play more video games and watch shitty kung fu movies again.
• Yard work.
• Seeing summer blockbusters and stuffing your fat face with a bucket of wet popcorn (this might just be a me thing).
• The inevitable jubilation of that first fall day when it peaks out at 67 degrees and you can breathe again, anticipating yearning for summer to roll back around again with its endless possibility.