Ozark - Season 2022 - Retrospective and The Drive

I’m going to try this one a little different. We just got back from the Ozarks yesterday. Consequently, Jenny and I watched the first episode of the last season of Ozark last night, and they started with the end, so I figured I’d try that.

It was nice to get caught up today! I started out with a nice run - a little slower and shorter than my normal route. Jenny and I got Starbucks, which we hadn’t done in a week. The dogs convalesced from their internment in Doggy Prison, er, camp. All in all it was shaping up to be a good day. We cleaned ou the Guinea Pig cage, then spent 45 minutes trying to retrieve Odin from underneath the hedge in the front yard that he decided was his new home…

It was especially nice not to be in 70+% humidity for once! The temperature was a little lower, and far less soupy!

Quinton and I went to the AT&T store to replace his iPhone. That was fun. We also mowed the lawn and overwatered our dry, dry plants. Oh, and it is father’s day, so that’s fun as well!

Oh, what happened with the iPhone you ask? Well, let’s rewind…

Day 1 - Ozark - the Drive

We were all “looking forward” to the drive. I mean, it was only a 10.5 hour drive, 4.5 hours less than our “normal” drive back to Wisconsin. Our destination was a nice house on the Lake of the Ozarks near Sunset Beach, Missouri, about 2 hours outside of Kansas City. 10.5 hours we figured we could do in 12 with stops and the like, so we got up a little after 5:00 AM and were on the road by 6:15 Mountain Time!

One thing we didn’t expect, how booooorrrrrriiiiiinnnnnnggggg the I70 drive through Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas was! Wow! I think this is the first time I’ve ever yearned for the varied scenery of I80 Nebraska, but that’s exactly what happened! The drive was super uneventful, other than paying tons of $$ for fuel (it was $4.79 per gallen in Kansas and Missouri) and the massive, somehow easterly winds throughout most of Kansas forcing poor Freddie Flex to work much harder than he is used to. We got a solid 22.5 miles per gallon in Eastern Colorado. That went down to 17.1 in Western Kansas due to the wind which somehow was always in our faces.

At just before 6:00 local time, we arrived at the Eagle’s Nest outside of Sunset Beach, Missouri. Our roommates were all already there. Micky, Tim, and Ally were there from Wisconsin, some of our oldest friends. Dan, Amy, Sawyer, and Max were all there, also from Wisconsin, but closer to Madison. Amy was Jenny’s college roommate and we’ve kept in touch and vacationed with their family for years now. And Todd and Sandi from Minnesota. Sandi went to college with Micky and we’ve done several amazing vacations with them as well. Everything was set for an eventful, but restful vacation. We literally had near zero plans to leave the complex, and we didn’t need to since it had just about everything we could need! We’ll do a full house tour in a subsequent post.

Todd and Sandi had dinner duty on Sunday. They made tacos with enough meat that we would be eating their leftovers the rest of the week. After that, given the fact that we hadn’t all seen each other for nearly a year (if not more), we sort of hit the booze a little hard. It was well after midnight when we finally retired, and we already taxed the recycling bin to the point of overflowing! It’s always nice to see old friends…