Elephant Juice: family vacation

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

family vacation

We just got home from our first official family vacation last Wednesday.
You might remember my excitement about our trip to the Ozarks in October from this post!

We spent three nights at The Big Cedar Lodge near Branson, Missouri and it was so beautiful. The PERFECT place to spend quality family time this time of year. If you've never been and are looking for relaxing, scenic, five-star place...I would highly recommend Big Cedar! It's about 10 miles outside of Branson, tucked back in the Ozarks. The resort has tons of stuff to do...mini golf, horse and carriage rides, horseback riding, miles and miles of trails, paddle boats, sand volleyball, basketball, tennis, heated pools, restaurants, a coffee house, adorable shop, and much more! You don't need to leave! Barrett was too little for lots of the activities, but we still had a great time and did a LOT of walking. The trails are all blacktop, so we just took the stroller and walked all over the property. Probably close to 5 miles in the three days we were there :)

I could talk about it forever...it's *AMAZING*
but you just want to see the pictures, so here you go!
As always, a few of my favorites!

This is the lodge we stayed in...Spring View Lodge

You drive over lots of beautiful spring crossings as you enter the resort

One of my favorite places... The Truman Coffee House

This house is original to the property! Isn't it adorable, like a little cottage. Perfect for a coffee shop that serves cinnamon rolls, coffee, tea, ice cream and cookies. We ate biscuits and gravy out on the front patio the first morning we were there. The weather was perfect.

Our first attempt at a family photo. Mr. B didn't want to cooperate.

Barrett's first time down a slide!

This was the last hole on the mini-golf course

The picture above has a bit of a story! The highway leading to the entrance of Big Cedar is winding and has all sorts of adorable little log cabin homes. Every time we'd come and go, we'd see these cool dirt roads, that were big steep hills leading down from the highway. There seemed to be one of them every few hundred feet. Justin kept saying "come on, let's take one and see where it goes." If you know me, I'm a bit of a worry wart..."what if it's someone's private drive, or we get lost, or someone kidnaps us"? Well, On our way back from a shopping trip into Branson one afternoon, Barrett was asleep in the back seat and I was driving. We came to one of these little roads off the highway. The street sign on the corner had an old tattered wooden sign hanging from it. It was sloppily painted with the words RuSTic FuRnituRe. You know the kind where random letters are capitalized. I decided to go check it out. Well, it started out as a steep dirt road and then turned into nothing but grassy ruts. We had been on it for quite a while, and still no sign of "rustic furniture." Not even any houses yet. That's when I started to get a little nervous. If it hadn't been for our Garmin, I would have been panicking. The Garmin actually recognized this grassy path as a road, and I could see on the map it did curve around and back to the highway we turned off from. So, I decided to take a deep breath and enjoy the little detour. It was so beautiful. Very STEEP hills though. That's when Justin decided to take over the wheel. I guess my driving made him nervous. So, we made it back to the highway, but still never found the "rustic furniture"! I told Justin it was like something out of a scary movie. Someone had just planted that sign there to get people to turn down the road so they could abduct them!

I took this picture into the trees while on our little detour! I was fully expecting to look at it when we got home and see a Sasquatch! If you see one I missed...let me know!