"Vacation" if you can call it that

Tim and I ate breakfast at Brenda's Cafe here in Bolivar. We decided that since we were on "Vacation" we wouldn't dirty any dishes before we left town.

Here I am holding all of our bags after a successful day of outlet shopping. Shopping is so much easier without a stroller.

We didn't make any reservations before we headed to Branson...since there are a ton of places to choose from. We ended up at this "lovely" place, The Lodge of the Ozarks. I told Tim when we got there that I didn't want to stay at a place that you had to enter your room from the outside. (That was a little harder than you think.) We checked out a few places, one was pretty far from where we wanted to be, the second one had a lobby that smelled like smoke. So, we found this place right on the strip. It was close to the go-carts, put-put golf and White Water. We did get a good deal on the room, but as soon as we walked in I noticed a funny smell. We thought it would go away if we opened the window but it didn't. I guess we finally got accustomed to the smell and forgot about it until we left the room and came back in.

This is where we ate dinner on Thursday night. We had heard a lot of really great things about it so we were pretty excited to try it out. When we walked in the door the smell of steak was amazing. Too bad we couldn't say the rest of the experience was as great. The inside reminded us of a Denny's restaurant that had been "renovated" into a steak house. Tim's steak was so dry and our waitress seemed like she was going to stress out before she even got our drinks to us. So, we were batting 0 for 2 so far on our "vacation"!

So, when you are in Branson and you don't want to go see The Box Car Willie Show, what do you do? You play Put-Put-Golf with 150 other people! We decided to not play golf on the strip since it was so busy. But I guess 148 other people had the same idea. We had a really good time playing at Pirate's Cove; It had two different courses to choose from. Of course Tim and I challenged each other to the more difficult one and I lost by one stroke. I was leading for the first few holes, but lost it soon after that. Tim had 3 hole-in-ones and I got 1! (I thought that was pretty good.) We took a touristy picture with the pirate before we left.

On Friday we spent most of the day at White Water. It was a beautiful day to be outside and the lines were not long at all. Tim did get a little sun burnt even after putting sunscreen on, but other than that we had a blast. Here is a picture of our favorite ride, Kalani Towers. You actually felt like you were free falling for a few seconds. When you are sitting at the top ready to go, you can't see the slide below you. It was a crazy feeling.

All in all we had a fun time getting away. Thanks mom and dad for watching Ellen for us!