A mere 5 days after Allison and I got back from Utah, we began our road trip to Missouri. I was finally going to get to visit a bucketlist theme park, Silver Dollar City, and Emily, Mary, Bonnie, James, and Millie were going to to join us there. Since it's only a slight detour to visit Emily and family in independence than to go straight to Branson, we decided to visit them first and see their whole family for a couple days.
We were able to leave around 1pm on Thursday and spent our first night in Salina, KS. While there I went outside to send a Marco Polo to Amy when I saw fireflies for the first time. I immediately grabbed Oscar and the kids to come outside and watch them with me.
The next morning we continued our drive to Emily's and spent a fun afternoon hanging out and catching up with her family. That evening I went with Emily to her book club get together. She invited me when she realized I'd be arriving that same evening, so I went ahead and read the book they were reading "The Bookshop of Secrets." We sat around a campfire where we had s'mores with homemade marshmallows. The homemade marshmallows roasted perfectly and got nice and toasted and gooey quickly. I didn't experience my typical issue of burning my marshmallows long before they get nice and gooey. Homemade marshmallows for the win! The girl who made them said they had extra protein in them, so they were even a little bit healthy!
We had a good chat about life and about the book and watched even more fun fireflies. Emily told me in the 6 years she's lived in Missouri, this has been the best year for fireflies. We made our trip at the perfect time!
Typically we would get a hotel when we visit Emily just so we don't add more crazy to her already crazy house full of 10 people. But this year the world cup was being held in Kansas City, and I couldn't find any hotels for less than $300. The kids were more than happy to have a sleepover with their cousins.
The next day Emily and I took Clark and Allison to Science City. We got free admission with our Denver Museum of Nature and Science travel passport. The parking in Union Station was a bit crazy with the extra crowds and World Cup festivities at Union Station that same day, but we made it in safe and sound. They had a dinosaur area with animatronic dinos right after you enter.
There was a spot where you could design your own digital dinosaur. Allison made one named Weirdosaurus before going over to play with Clark. Clark really liked the topographical map sand.
Here they are on the hamster wheel.
They then learned about the science of carnival games and played in the play structure.
After some water play we saw it had turned cloudy outside. We figured we should go outside before it either rained or the sun came out strong again. The kids liked climbing on the structure that looks like hanging red and white Pringles.
Here's Allison on the sky bike while Emily and Clark looked on from below.
We hopped into the helicopter before heading downstairs.
They had a cool remote controlled robo dog that was doing tricks and jumping around excitedly. It was fun to watch kids run up to pet it then run away as quick as they could.
We got back from the museum around 5:00pm and found everyone having a great time playing "Telestrations."
We drove a couple hours south and booked a room at a Super 8 in Bollivar, MO. We wanted to make it far enough out that the hotel prices wouldn't be too inflated for the World Cup.
At midnight Allison woke us all up crying that her tooth was hurting her. We gave her some ibuprofen and she was able to fall back asleep, but at breakfast time she was crying again. Just trying to eat a soft bagel was super painful for her. We found an Urgent Care that does dental care in Springfield, MO and decided to have her seen to make sure she didn't have a major tooth infection.
While we filled out paper work in the waiting room, rain and wind started coming down hard. Just as Allison was taken back to a room for x-rays, we experienced our first tornado warning. They took everyone in the building down to their safe shelter, which was also their employee gym. Oscar and Tyler used the treadmill while Allison tried to rest on the stretch mat. It was right in front of the mat and she was getting cold, so I moved it over to the other side of the room and helped make her a bit more comfortable.
Once the warning passed and Allison was seen by the dentist, we found out what the problem was. Her tooth is coming in crooked due to losing the baby tooth above it when she was 4 years old. It's pushing against a molar she already has, while another molar is growing in on the other side of that tooth. The tooth is fine, but it hurts so much because it's getting pressure from both sides. They told us there was really not a lot we could do besides give her pain medicine, and that it would probably flare up occasionally for the next month of so. We were happy to know it wasn't anything serious that would require an emergency root canal or tooth extraction.
It was still raining pretty hard when we came out, so we changed our original plans of visiting a historic battlefield and looked for an indoor place instead. We searched up our ASTC travel passport and found it gave us free admission to the nearby "Discovery Center."
Allison found a piano to play and Tyler found a Minecraft building room.
I found a big room with a giant video game being played with little dodgeballs. I knew the kids would love it, so I grabbed Allison first and then went and found Tyler.
At 1:30pm we went to church at our friends' ward in Ozark. Here's Tyler with his buddy Luke. His family was in our ward and Luke was in his 4th grade class before their family moved to Missouri.
We then drove down to our hotel in Branson. It's a Hilton Vacation Club property we now have access to using our timeshare points at since upgrading to HGV MAX. They're working on getting up to Hilton standards, but they're not quite there yet. Check-in was at 4:00pm, we arrived at 4:45pm, and they didn't have our room ready until 6:30pm. When we did finally check in, we had to call maintenance since one of the bathroom and bedroom doors wouldn't close and lock properly. We were also missing shower gel in both bathrooms, laundry detergent, and dish soap and a sponge in the kitchen. They did get all those things to us when we texted, and the staff was friendly, but I could understand what people meant in the reviews I'd read when they said it's not quite up to Hilton standards. In spite of those negatives, we were all very comfortable. The AC worked well, the unit was spacious enough for all 9 of us to eat meals there together, there were jetted tubs in both bathrooms, and the beds were nice and soft. We'd booked a 2 bedroom unit and two studios. Once Emily and her crew arrived, Tyler bunked with James in one studio, Emily and Millie bunked in the other, and all the older girls came in with us.
Most of our time in Branson was spent at Silver Dollar City. We have a whole bunch of photos from those 3 days, so they'll get their own post.
When we left Branson on Thursday, we took a trip to St Louis to visit Gateway Arch National Park. We also walked by the Old Courthouse, but I had no idea it was a historic building until we saw it in the kids' Jr Ranger books. It's where several of the famous Dred Scott trials were held.
We had a trip to the top of the Arch scheduled for 4:50pm, the last tour they offered before it closed for the day. We arrived around 4:10pm and walked around the Arch museum learning about the initial monument design contest. These photos were early models for the arch and surrounding area. It was an effort to revive the water front and make a monument that would last for centuries to come.
Here we are riding up the interesting indoor Ferris Wheel elevator type ride up the arch.
This is what it looked like on the inside with everyone leaning over to see out little windows. Normally you can only be on the north or the south side of the Arch, but since we were the last tour of the day, they opened up both sides for us to see it all.
We stayed as long as we were allowed to, then came back down the elevator and got the kids sworn in as Jr Rangers. We then drove to Columbia MO where we got a hotel for the night. After a good night's sleep we drove to Emily's, hung out for a few hours, then continued our drive, though we had to go back 25 minutes in since I realized I'd left my purse at her house. Doh!
We stayed in Oakley, KS that evening where we saw a beautiful sunset about 30 minutes before arriving. In spite of the smell (Oakley has a lot of livestock) we managed to get some sleep and made it home around 11am the next morning.
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