Abbie's Real Life Blog

Well, for all my huffing and puffing about Fred’s Hotel: Now With Color TV, the weekend was great.  My whole family came down and the weather was perfect, and generally we had a nice time.

Except for that loss by Missouri on Saturday night.  It was pretty painful to watch that go down.  Color TV or no, that sucked ass.  Actually, it was a nice big flatscreen television, and there was enough seating in the living room area of our three-bedroom condo that several of us could watch it together.

My brother and sister-in-law were there, and Tracy and my parents, and my sister and her notboyfriend.  The place was right on the water (my bedroom faced the boat launch, which woke me up early on Saturday morning) and had a huge screened-in porch.  It also had a full kitchen and two bathrooms.  It was a very nice place, just off Highway 54 and down the road from the outlet mall.  That doesn’t sound very pleasant, but it really was very pleasant.  It was very, very nice.  The place was Robin’s Resort, if you are interested.  I recommend it!  We may end up doing this again in the spring, or making it an annual event.

Anyway, we played mini golf (I am a champion mini-golfer, if you must know, as long as high score wins!  Because I always manage to have the highest score!)  and we did the go-carts and we went to the outlet mall and we did the batting cages and we played skee-ball and we bought fudge and salt water taffy and we played board games and I was forced to perform on the Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine in front of everybody, just for their amusement.  Dance, dance!  they told me.  Dance!  Then I practiced my Sarah Palin accent for hours, and boy were they sorry after that.

I finished off the first roll of film in my new Holga and will drop it at Columbia Photo later today.  Yay!  I hope a couple of those photos turned out.  I also took a boatload of photos with my normal camera, but the leaves were nowhere near peak down there, so I didn’t bother getting up and trying to do photos at the state park or at Ha Ha Tonka.  I slept in.  It was great.  But there should be some color this weekend, somewhere.  I will pursue the autumnal colors this weekend for sure.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Lake of the Ozarks is a reservoir on the Osage and Niangua Rivers in south central Missouri.  While most ‘lakes’ are roundish in shape, with smoothish edges, the Lake of the Ozarks is shaped like a serpent with a ragged edge of flooded tributaries.  It’s about 92 miles from end to end with about 1,150 miles of shoreline, and when it was built in the 1930s, it was the largest man-made lake in the United States.  It is currently the largest man-made, non-flood-control lake in the United States.

It’s now a major tourist destination for the Midwest, with tens of thousands of vacation homes and condominums and hotels and motels along the edges.  For many people in Missouri, especially in the rural parts of Missouri, one refers to the Lake of the Ozarks simply as ‘the Lake’.  And because it is so long, there are some very popular areas around it (Osage Beach is probably the biggest tourist area) and some much more rural areas.

My grandparents kept a trailer in a lakeside trailer park as a vacation home for most of my life, complete with fishing boat, up until a few years ago.  We would spend several days down there every summer.  It wasn’t much, but it was a few steps up from camping.  It wasn’t until I was in high school that we ever did any of the fun Lake stuff, like the mini-golf or the water park.  That was mostly seen as a waste of money, but it was also on the other side of the Lake- maybe twenty miles as the crow flies, but at least an hour away.  Since I was a kid, they did build a bridge that connects those two areas, but it’s a toll bridge and I’m sure that wouldn’t have swayed anyone’s opinion of the frivolity of the Lake activities at the time.

I also went on my high school senior trip to the Lake, right before graduation.  I had a very small high school class, and it was a lot of fun.  We went to the Ozark Opry, shopped on the Strip, did the bumper boats, went swimming, and the like.  It was a good time too.

Anyway, it was a pretty weekend and I had a good time.  The Color TV wasn’t even the half of it.