Escape Off the Grid to a Sweet Houseboat on a Peaceful Lake

Rent a houseboat for the ultimate dog-friendly escape to the outdoors, especially for over-scheduled families

A lake without lakefront homes is truly a vision of beauty. You feel transported to another time before human development scarred the landscape. It doesn’t matter what time it is or what day it is when you’re on the lake. We wake up when it’s bright and we head to bed once it gets dark. We nap when we feel like it; we eat our favorite comfort foods, and our dogs can wander off-leash on the shoreline, jumping in for a swim when they feel like it. A trip to the lake feels like a real escape.

For the past 20 years, my husband and I have made annual treks to Shasta Lake and rented a houseboat. House boating has always been an escape for us, as everything slows down once you’re on the lake. During the first few years, the two of us and our little terrier mix, Scrappy, happily rented the smallest houseboat (37' long x 14' wide). Once we had kids, we upgraded to a larger model (47' x 14') as we needed more space for all the extra baby gear/toys. It was less relaxing while the kids were awake until they were older and more capable of independent reading or relaxing on inner tubes.

Renting a houseboat is an upgrade from camping since you have your own private bathroom and shower (with remarkably hot water and good water pressure). Instead of an air mattress on the ground, you get to sleep on a gaucho bed (a thick vinyl cushion on a wooden platform that converts from a bench to a double bed). You are not confined to a campsite when you’re on a houseboat. The few times I went camping, we sometimes had neighbors who were loud drunks blasting music until midnight — not a pleasant situation for those who like silence.

On a houseboat, you also have a kitchen with a propane-powered stove, plenty of counter space, a sink, and a microwave. It’s like renting an RV for a trip, but instead of busy freeways or curvy one-lane roads, you have a stunning lake to explore at your convenience.

If you’re a parent and your kids are young enough to head to bed before you’re sleepy (or old enough to entertain themselves), it can feel like you are YOU again when you’re soaking in the quiet serenity of a lake. Instead of a harried parent, or an overworked employee, you are just a person savoring the moment.

To be fair, there is still a low level of background stress, mostly in anticipation of surprise issues. Strong winds can rock the boat, and silence means every creak and rattle is clearly heard. My husband never sleeps well because he’s often on high alert for something to go wrong in the middle of the night. For instance, when you “park” your houseboat in a cove, you tie 2 anchor ropes from the back of the houseboat farthest from the shore to metal stakes that you hammer into the shore about 45 degrees from each side of the boat. We regularly find a stake is yanked from the ground after particularly fierce winds. Then your boat rotates to one side, parallel to the shore. You rush to turn the engine on, spin the boat back to a perpendicular position to shore (without yanking out the other stake that stayed in), and then hurry to shore to hammer the stake back in.

It feels almost like parenting — you feel you finally have a hang of things and relax a little, only to quickly discover your kid entered a new stage of childhood where all the old rules don’t apply. So you scramble to respond before things get worse. Then you wait in anticipation of the next surprise coming.

When you’re sitting on the deck of your houseboat, docked in a quiet cove, you realize you really are all alone. There is an eerie silence in the middle of nowhere, especially at night. There are no random noises like dogs barking, babies crying, or music blasting as you might experience in the suburbs, nor any of the louder city sounds like the squealing brakes of the bus, the buzz of people talking, or the hum of street lights.

At night, the stars call to you, as they stud the sky in ways you never realized until you’re miles from civilization and man-made lights. You might go nearly a day before you see another soul if you find the right secluded cove.

Sometimes the wind suddenly dies. Then the lake becomes flat as a mirror, reflecting the sky and hills above it. The photo I took above showcases the beauty of such times. At other times, the wind might gently churn the water, making your houseboat rock on the small waves. Bigger waves occur when there are occasional passersby — boaters looking for prime fishing spots or party boats full of visitors on a day trip to the lake. Time your visit carefully so you avoid the high season. Music echoes on a lake, so the one time we visited in the summer, we were upset that our normally peaceful vacation was ruined by a boat blasting music from a mile away and the many boats frequently passing by.

There is always lots of laughter and compulsory time together when you’re on a 53’ x 15' houseboat (the larger model we rent now that we bring 2 teens and 2 large dogs). Conditions are ripe for lots of family bonding time when there is no TV, no cell signal, and no Wi-Fi. We are completely off the grid once we leave the marina. No cell signal means there’s no FaceTime, no work email, no social media. The advantages are clear, especially with elementary school-aged kids and older kids. We have no other distractions but us.

Over the past 20 years we have been house boating, we have enjoyed:

• Playing onshore, building a “mud fort”
• Building a bonfire and roasting s’mores
• Playing fetch with our dogs and watching them explore the shoreline
• Reading books
• Learning to skip pebbles
• Playing card games like Cards Against Humanity (family version!) and Exploding Kittens
• Learning to fish (my girls are adept at bass fishing, with one preferring to use the dart head method and the other using the drop shot method)
• Lounging in an inner tube on the lake or going down the slide
• Enjoying classic meals cooked on the grill like hot dogs, burgers, BBQ chicken, and ribs
• Crowding around one laptop to watch a movie
• Peacefully watching as the sunlight casts different shadows and the wind changes the flat mirror-like surface of the lake into ripples
• Moving our houseboat to a different cove if we have noisy neighbors
• Relishing the emptiness and solitude of the lake, as it is so huge we often only see occasional fishermen once we dock

Of course, there are some drawbacks:

• Bug bites (they especially love my eldest daughter, no matter how much bug repellant we spray on her clothes, citronella candles we light, or bug repellant bracelets she wears)
• Mud on shoes, clothes, and bedding (it’s inescapable!)
• Now that our kids are older, they miss their friends so we limit our trips to 3 days now
• Uncomfortable “gaucho beds” (wooden platforms with a thick vinyl cushion on top) but it makes us so happy when we return home and sleep on proper beds
• Being too hot or too cold (propane heater makes it so hot that you can’t leave it on all night, so you wake up shivering when it’s early spring, yet in the summer or late spring, the swamp cooler isn’t as effective as central air conditioning)
• Motion sickness when speed boats pass by and churn the water
• Usually, we see ducks, deer, and fish, but one year, a large bear crawled onto our boat one trip to eat garbage from the can on the deck. My eldest was only 2 (and I might even have been pregnant with my second) so we freaked out that only a glass sliding door separated us from a huge predator. We had some cell reception, so my husband called 911. The dispatcher told us to just wait until the bear crawled off, so we sat there watching this bear eat garbage.
• We have had mechanical issues on every trip (e.g., fridge stops working, the heater isn’t working, no hot water as pilot light blew out in high winds, etc.). It’s frustrating, as it involves driving back toward the marina until we get some spotty cell phone reception to call for a mechanic to come to repair the item. This may be related to renting basic boats from the budget-friendly marina. There are fancy “luxury houseboats” that cost twice as much that we have never tried before. They also have hot tubs on the rooftop deck, so that’s a whole other league!

We just returned from this year’s houseboat trip, our first vacation since Feb. 2020 because we canceled last year’s trip. I finally feel recharged and ready to take on the remaining challenges of 2021. I hope we continue to go to Shasta Lake every year, even after our kids leave for college. It won’t be the same house boating without them, but it will continue to be a fantastic escape from real life.