Today was about as lazy as we can get on vacation. We slept in, enjoyed coffee and chocolate milk in our little Lake Cabin, and were just lazy… like didn’t get dressed until after 12pm lazy. And it was wonderful!

Finally, we decided to get dressed and headed down to the lake for a little swimming and exploring. Table Rock Lake is absolutely beautiful. It is a reservoir lake created by Table Rock Dam. It’s not a traditional circular lake. The lake is more snakelike covering 43,000 acres! The beach and swimming area are right down the road from the cabin and these two liked trying to sink the swimming lane floats. While Mike and I found seashells and rocks with seashells fossils imprinted on them. Pretty cool to find seashells in Missouri.

After the lake, the boys found another basketball court and ball behind the cabins, so we spent another hour playing parents vs. boys… It didn’t seem really hot when we started but good gracious, after playing the boys, it was hot!

After showers, we headed to Branson for dinner and the Queen Esther performance at the Sight & Sound Theater. The roads between Table Rock Lake and Branson are really curvy, so Leo took the front seat to reduce any car sickness.

The boys suggested Japanese for dinner, but we didn’t really want to go to a restaurant where the cook at the table since it always makes your clothes smell like dinner for the rest of the night… a few Yelp searches later, and we found our place, Mitsu Neko Fusion. Absolutely nothing to look at outside, but fantastic service and food!

Even saw the biggest Chicken we’ve ever seen. 🤣

We made it to the Sight & Sound Theater. This is the second Sight & Sound theater, the first being in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We loved the outside statues and buildings. The theater itself is HUGE!

We had to make the photo that everyone seemed to be making. One poor lady was waiting on her husband to park the car, and had gotten caught making everyone’s picture. But she was really good at photography 🤣

Inside the theater was amazing! It is really hard to explain the sets – they are breathtaking! Three dimensional with turning sets that move and change. And the costumes and voices were just incredible. The story of Queen Esther is one of my favorites in the Bible and this production brought it all to life.

At the end, the actors didn’t come out to applause and standing ovations, instead they came out and offered the plan of salvation for anyone who didn’t know Jesus or offered prayer for anyone who requested. It was definitely not what we expected but it was so sweet to see.

After we left the theater, we were headed home when 🚔🚨 Busted! Just kidding – no issue with driving, instead it was the license plate. The car we rented was new and didn’t have a license plate – instead it had a paper temporary license plate taped to the back window. At night with our dirty back window, you couldn’t see the temporary license plate, so we looked like an unlicensed SUV rolling down the road. The officers (oh yea, they called for backup so we had 2 police cars with lights) were very nice and after the ran Mike’s license to make sure he didn’t have any warrants, we were on our way.

Good lesson for the boys to be kind and respectful to the officers just doing their job… and also to not have outstanding warrants and wash your car windows 🤣

After we got home, we decided to play a little garbage, even though someone would only play 2 hands before he needed to go to bed.

Tomorrow we’ll have to get up and moving before noon because we have an adventure out on Table Rock Lake planned.