Last year as us UniBartEnhauers sat at the Sunday dinner table discussing our family adventure for 2023, we concocted tales of wine country California (too expensive), the mountains of North Carolina (done that), or perhaps the gulf side of Florida (came in 2nd place). Brett and I threw out "let's go to the Ozarks!" and somehow it won the bid. I'm not entirely sure what we had in mind when we suggested it - maybe farmland and creeping rivers - but we got a whole different bag of oysters after we booked the flights and began searching for things to do.
We'd booked a house, a pretty log cabin on a rushing river, just outside of Branson. We knew there'd be fishing and boating and kayaks and what not, but it turns out that Branson is like a country music themed Myrtle Beach and there were all kinds of musicals, and shows, and tacky buildings lit up like Las Vegas. We didn't wind up partaking in most of what Branson was selling but we did do some shopping, gawking, and eating.
Hanging out in the rental house was the best part of the trip. We had bonfires and card games and billiard tournaments. We took turns cooking supper, tried and failed to watch a couple movies, and endlessly amused each other with foolishness. At any given moment, it was as safe bet that Lee was out on the dock fishing. He was as happy as we've ever seen him. Ellen did a great job with attitude and participation, only retreating to bed for short naps and a few early bedtimes. She was all spunky and happy to be away from her children.
Brett suddenly became someone who wakes up at 6am and goes jogging. I don't what got into him, but by the time I'd get out of bed at 8:30ish, he'd have jogged, gone for a bike ride, made coffee, and finished up his Honwork. One morning I woke up and he was nowhere to be found. Mom said he'd gone kayaking up the river "a long time ago" and we began to wonder if something had happened to him.
He said the ride back was great though and he convinced Ellen and me to join him at the top of the dam (via car) to float back to house in our kayaks. It was just as lovely as he said it would be but boy was that water cold. 50˚ they told us. I accidentally ran my kayak into a stump that turned me sideways enough to let water come rushing in. Ellen got jammed up too and grabbed onto a tree branch that snapped right off, sending her barreling into me. We had lots of fun. Dad later joined Brett and me for a final float down the river.
The Fellas went on a fishing charter one day and came back with only two fish they were allowed to keep. The next day, Lee really dedicated himself to the task and procured a handful more for supper.
Something in the area seemed to trigger Mom's previously dormant ability to get ophthalmic migraines. Initially we thought it might be the potent plastic-chemical smell of the rental car, but even after boycotting it, she still got a few more. Dad divided his time between reading, heckling family members, researching things to do, and enjoying the patio.
Daytimes were for whatever anyone wanted to do. For most of us, it was a mixed bag of activities. One morning Brett came flying into the bedroom looking all wild and yanked me out of bed to go hiking. He'd found some trail that led to a waterfall. I had school that afternoon so I gave him one rule: get me back by 2:00. We were having a lovely hike when about 30 minutes in, I noticed a tick crawling up his leg. Perhaps you recall our last encounter with a tick? Well, the rest of our adventure became about tick inspections, and I'll tell you, they were everywhere. We began to run through the grassier patches of our hike and then stop in the more rocky sections to pick ticks off of each other. The hike was taking longer than expected, what with the excessively frequent tick checks. We finally made it to a stream where that Big Guy Eisenhauer took off every scrap of clothes he had on, right there in the daylight, to check for ticks. "Look in-between your toes!" he told me as I sat ladylike in my underwear. There were ticks in my pants. I'll zoom ahead and tell you that we found 24 ticks between us, we never found the waterfall, and I was 15 minutes late for class.
My favorite parts of our trip were the evenings. Ellen and I played a few of the worst games of pool in the history of the sport. Lee and I swapped sad country songs. The whole family played Shanghai, and Brett whipped up a delicious fruit pie. Dad danced and sang to his favorite songs and Big Mama struggled not to laugh our juvenile behavior.
The funny thing about the family trips is that all my favorite parts have nothing to with the locale. It's when you put everyone at the table together that things get real fun. It's just like a big, extended Sunday Dinner, but this time we had something different to gawk at. Normally, I'm good about writing down the bits we laughed at each day, but I didn't keep my Captain's Log on this trip. It was much more laid-back than our usual, more scheduled ventures, and that's part of what made it so great.
