My favorite spot in our homeaway.com rental cottage on Cape Cod, Ma.

Last fall I started organizing my family’s semi-annual reunion in on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. As kids, my three brothers and our cousins on both sides of the family summered “down the Cape,” and we share the same nostalgic Kodachrome memories — tanned brown bodies, living in bathing suits, riding bikes on sandy unpaved roads, cook outs, spectacular thunderstorms, and of course the beach that seemed to go on forever.

I can still hear the soundtrack — Elton John, Jim Croce, Linda Rondstadt, and James Taylor playing through tinny car radios…

In an effort to recreate those carefree days and warm summer nights for our own kids, I began my quest for a six-bedroom rental “cottage” (as they are all called, no matter the size) for our entire family. I narrowed it down to the town of Falmouth, and spent hours clicking through websites, finally settling on this house that I found on homeaway.com

Homeaway is well organized, thorough, and easy to navigate. You can click through for details, photos, a calendar showing availability, and contact info for the owners. Rates are posted up front, and you can conduct searches by date or rental rate.

A comprehensive list of amenities is included on each listing. It’s also easy to sort listings and there is a comparison feature. Some listings contain reviews.

The 14 of us converged at 52 Crescent Lane on the last week in June. At a spacious 3,400 sq. ft., including a vast but dank basement, there was plenty of room for our crew.

Highlights included a lovely front porch with ocean views and white wicker furniture, a fireplace, piano, double parlor, and Central Park directly across the street with a baseball diamond, basketball hoop and a huge expanse of lush green grass to kick a ball around, play Frisbee, or shoot off rockets.

Central Park in Falmouth was a huge asset to our rental.

Turnoffs were the abundance of paneling (every room), no bathtubs (an issue for those of us with babies), mildew in the upstairs bathroom, crappy mattresses in some of the rooms, a lame outdoor shower (basically just a hose), and a general need for updating and landscaping. There was a pervasive dumpiness — which actually has an upside in a beach house, you don’t worry about tracking sand everywhere.

My fantasy of recreating those endless summer days running barefoot through the surf with my cousins and playing tag in the dunes on wide open Cape Cod beaches was somewhat dampened. Not by the house, literally by the weather. You’ve heard of staycations, well this was a raincation.

But that’s where the fireplace, DVDs on laptops, ice creams trips to Falmouth Center, and most importantly the British Beer Company, the local pub on the corner came in.

And since it really didn’t rain all day, just was serially overcast (kind of like the summer in San Francisco that I was trying to escape), Central Park was totally key. In fact we all got a ton of exercise — biking, pedaling rented pedicabs, running or walking along the shore, shooting hoops, and kicking around the soccer ball.

Falmouth Heights Beach was visible from our cottage.

We actually did make it to the beach a few times, where the kids romped, jumped off the stone wall onto the sand, buried each other, and “took dips” in the salty Atlantic, forging new Cape Cod memories of their own. Mission accomplished.

Photos by Lisa Dion.