The cabin guidelines ask you to be courteous and not too loud for your neighbors. No one near us was loud, even though most of the cabins appeared to be occupied. There are rules about too many people gathering at one site, to deter parties. This wouldn’t be the place to bring a big group and play drinking games.
By Allison Torres Burtka
I’d heard about Postcard Cabins’ tiny cabins, nestled in wooded areas but within an easy drive of cities across the country, from a friend who wanted to rent one solo to unplug. But then I found out that there’s one within a 90-minute drive from where I live in the Detroit area, the cabins allow dogs, and some have room for four people. So my husband and I packed our two kids and our dog into the car and spent a weekend in a tiny cabin in a destination I’d never heard of: Columbiaville, Michigan, population 712.
My family loves spending time in nature, both at home and at faraway national parks. The tiny cabins seemed like an easily accessible adventure, where we could take the dog along and spend time together around a campfire, without totally roughing it or spending a lot of money.
On the Postcard Cabins (formerly Getaway Cabins) website, the cabins looked inviting: They are minimalist but modern and sort of sleek—more of an Ikea aesthetic than a country log cabin. They have queen beds with fluffy white bedding, a bathroom, and a mini kitchen. Outside, there’s a firepit, table, and chairs.
When we got to the property address, we weren’t sure what to expect. All I knew was that there would be a bunch of cabins in the woods somehow. We turned off the main road onto a windy gravel road and followed the signs for different cabins. There were far more of them than I’d imagined: 45 on this site. But they seemed fairly spread out, not right on top of each other. And, as promised, they were all surrounded by trees.
We pulled up to our cabin, labeled “Victoria.” We later learned that all the cabins are named after staff members’ or guests’ grandparents. We got out of our car, our dog already excited about the new smells on the ground. We could see a couple of other cabins, but our cabin and firepit area were situated so that we weren’t looking directly at anyone else.
We went inside, and the kids loved that there was a loft with a ladder: They’d be sleeping on the bed up top. There was a small table with benches, little stovetop, kitchen sink, and bathroom with a shower—although a sign warned us that we’d run out of hot water if we took long showers. Outside, we had a picnic table and Adirondack chairs around the firepit.
After we got settled, we went to wander the grounds. We walked along the gravel road that winds through the property, waving hello to some people and dogs sitting outside their cabins, and then on a leaf-lined path through the woods, noticing the afternoon sun coming through the trees. The path took us to the edge of a small river.
We had thought about eating dinner at one of the restaurants nearby, but we decided to bring and make our own food, to make it more of a camping-like experience. So we cooked mac and cheese on the little stove and ate it sitting in the Adirondack chairs around the fire. (The cabins provide dishes and cookware, as well as some food that you can buy.)
Then we moved on to the most important course: s’mores. The cabins come with firewood you can purchase, along with everything you need to get a fire started. They also come with s’mores kits that you can buy, but we had brought our own ingredients—we would have been disappointed if the kits provided the wrong kind of marshmallows! There’s something about the sensory experience of eating s’mores that you make around a campfire, surrounded by trees, with the smell of the fire and of crisp leaves in the air, that is unlike anything else.
The cabin guidelines ask you to be courteous and not too loud for your neighbors. No one near us was loud, even though most of the cabins appeared to be occupied. There are rules about too many people gathering at one site, to deter parties. This wouldn’t be the place to bring a big group and play drinking games.
When we were done with s’mores, we went inside and sat at the table, sort of surprised that all four of us fit at it comfortably, including my tall husband. The cabin is well designed: The table has a bench on each side, and the back of one bench is right up against the bed. We played some of our favorite games, Uno and Skip-Bo, while singing along to music on Spotify, which we played through the cabin’s retro-looking speaker. We went to bed warm and cozy.
Two sides of the cabin had huge windows, which we’d kept closed at night. When we opened them in the morning, sunshine filled the cabin, and the view out each window was a thick mass of trees. The cabins nearby weren’t visible from the inside.
That day, we drove to a park that we’d looked up beforehand that allowed dogs and appeared to have some nice walking trails. We always like exploring unfamiliar parks, even if they aren’t that big or that exciting. It’s where we shift into play mode as a family. My husband and daughters and I are all runners, and the dog is sometimes a runner, so we decided to do some trail running at this park. It was more beautiful than we’d anticipated. We ran through the woods and came to the sandy shoreline of a lake that we didn’t know was there.
My daughters run on their cross-country teams, but the four of us don’t usually run together, so it was a treat to run as a family, including the dog. She shifted into play mode, too, leaping over fallen logs. And she was in heaven because of all the smells that are different from the ones on the trails at home.
After we got back to the cabin, we spent time reading and journaling around the firepit. The cabins come with a little wood “cellphone lockbox” that invites you to put your phones in it, warning that you probably aren’t going to get much service, anyway. During our stay, we used our phones to take pictures, but otherwise, it was pretty much a phone-free weekend—something that doesn’t tend to happen at home. My tween called it an “offline vacation.”
Being away from home also allowed us to be free of other distractions that demand our attention on weekends—including work and housework—and to focus on enjoying each other’s company. The time together in nature was just what we needed.
The Rust Belt and the Midwest are full of great vacation destinations. In Michigan, this includes Detroit, the beach towns along Lake Michigan on the west side of the state, and the more remote Upper Peninsula. The Postcard Cabins description of our Columbiaville site is the Thumb—meaning the thumb of the mitten shape that is Michigan. While the Thumb has its vacation spots, Columbiaville isn’t really one of them. It wouldn’t be on a list of “vacation destinations” in a travel magazine.
To me, this opens up possibilities for nearby getaways. It shows that you don’t have to go very far away to escape. It felt much farther away than it was, probably because it was somewhere new to us.
The woods and parks where we spent our time were beautiful, but they weren’t exactly remarkable. You can find woods and parks like them all over the country, and that’s the point: For us, this trip wasn’t about the destination itself. It was about intentionally spending uninterrupted time with each other in nature. My teen daughter said that in a setting like that, it’s hard not to appreciate the nature around you.
We stayed at our cabin in November, past the peak fall colors in Michigan, but being there when all the trees are shades of bright red and yellow would be spectacular. And I can imagine enjoying the cabins at any time of year, since they have both heat and AC. Even in Michigan’s coldest months, you could tromp through the snow and return to a firepit and a warm cabin.
Tiny cabins like this are an alternative to camping for people who don’t want to rough it completely but don’t want to stay in a boring hotel room, either. The cost per night for a four-person cabin at our site ranged from about $90 to $250, depending on the date. (There’s a $50 fee per stay if you bring a dog.) A chain hotel room nearby would fall in that same range. But staying at a hotel and leaving the building to go for walks in the woods would have been an entirely different experience for my family. No s’mores, no sitting outside, no wandering through the woods outside our door.
These kinds of cabins are also an alternative to an Airbnb or VRBO, which have their perks, particularly when we want space to spread out in, and maybe a full kitchen and laundry facilities. But this time, we didn’t need the space. Just the nature.
In urban areas, there’s a push to encourage people to spend time in “nearby nature,” even if it’s a small park with a little greenery. A growing body of research has shown that spending time in nature can improve physical and mental health and feelings of overall well-being. I see these kinds of cabins as something in between your local park and a trip to a Big Park that’s farther from home. They can get people immersed in nature in places they would never visit otherwise.
Camping is the same idea, I realize. Campsites aren’t always in remarkable places. But not everybody has the gear to do that—or the know-how or willingness to make it happen. Maybe people who camp in tents all the time wouldn’t see the attraction of tiny cabins, because they feel closer to nature without an actual roof or actual door in between them and the great outdoors. But we appreciated the luxury of a toilet, shower, and mini kitchen inside our little cabin.
Postcard has 10 cabins across the Midwest, and other “tiny house resorts” set up in woodsy areas or on waterfronts across the country seem to have similar looks and similar philosophies. If one end of the continuum is camping and rustic cabins at parks, and the other end is hotels and rental houses, I think tiny cabins fit in the middle.
This is an experience my family and I would like to repeat, but I also see the appeal of going solo. Because I’m a writer, it could be a quiet solo writing retreat for me. Write, hike, write, sleep, repeat.
If my family stays in these cabins again, maybe we’ll go to the little general store and pizza place in town next time. But this time, we had everything we needed. And our perspective on vacation destinations has broadened.
Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor in metro Detroit. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Runner’s World, Women’s Running, Insider, and Well+Good, as well as Detroit-area publications including Model D and Planet Detroit. She also writes for the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainability in Business. You can see more of her writing at atburtka.journoportfolio.com.
