Today was another one of those days that Mike and I will talk about when the boys are grown and out of the house. One of the best days ever! It will rank up there with the day that Leo met Captain America, when Michael researched and found Moss Beach, like the day we spent on Lake Payette in Idaho, or white water rafted in Glacier National Park on the 4th of July and a Bald Eagle flew by.. It was just the best day.

The boys have been looking forward to this day for the entire vaction, and when I initially looked at Friday’s weather, I was ready to cry. Originally, it was a little rainy… then it switched to isolated thunderstorms… then it was thunderstorms all day with “some severe”… then it was rainy… and then it was scattered rain, and when we woke up Friday morning… Thank you Lord for hearing our very specific prayers… Partly cloudy with possible rain after dark! Hallelujah!

We have rented a pontoon boat on Table Rock Lake for the day. The tubes and lilly pads are first come first serve, so the boys made sure we were AT the marina at 11am (when pick up started). We thought we would have a grill on the boat, but there was a bit of miscommunication, so we grabbed a bag of ice to keep the patties cool, and off we went. With a photo of our dock, so we could remember later, Capt. Brown was ready to roll!

Table Rock Lake is HUGE – 43,000 acres! We took of photo of the map, but eventually needed to use GPS later in the day…

This boat is awesome! It has an upper deck – only for use when not moving – with a slide! Sometimes we used the slide and sometimes, there were just bodies flying over the edge 🤣

The lake was beautiful and the temperature was perfect – like just slightly warm bathwater… cool enough to cool off but not so cold you didn’t want to jump in. And the color – it was like green-blue. Boys described it best, it was the color of Mountain Dew’s Baja Blast drink.

We would ride, and tube, ride and rube, ride and tube…

Even Mike and I tried the slide and swam for a while.

Then we noticed the sides of lake. We think it was limestone, but more importantly, we saw folks jumping off of it… Cliff Jumping? Heck Yea!

We took a break for a bit, and opened Mom’s Cafe @ Table Rock Lake. But then, it was back in the water. I wish I knew how many miles they covered on this tube. 😊

We would take a break and ride a bit, and then toss the tube in and take off!

We went under bridges and snacked. We found more cliffs to jump off. Some even had ropes for swinging! I’m not sure who put this rope WAY UP in that tree, but you sure made two boys from North Carolina happy!

Even I got in on the cliff jumping… although once was enough for me. Climbing the rocks was scary going up!

The boys admitted that that was one was a little scary because of the climb.

We tubed some more, and Mike got really good at bouncing them in the air.

We stayed on the lake for 9 hours 😁 finally bringing the boat in at 8pm. The sunset on the lake was perfect end to perfect day!

We headed back to our little cabin and started laundry while the burgers cooked and wings warmed up. This was one hungry bunch!

I looked up as I was typing this, and discovered that genetics run much deeper than just features, eyes and hair color… apparently, it controls body positioning too.🤣

Two hands of garbage was all we could make it through until we were just too tired to stay up any longer. Best capstone to a great vacation! Tomorrow, we have one more travel day back to St Louis before we head home.