Missouri Vacation Part Two

This summer as My Sweetie and I were trying to figure out what days he was going to take off for work he had said he wanted to do several long weekends and maybe go camping. One of those long weekends were in June and we went to St. Louis but opted to stay downtown. A good choice since it was SO HOT when we were there! The other few weekends we had other things going on. As his last long weekend quickly approached we weren't convinced that we really needed or should be taking ANOTHER vacation. They cost money, ya know! We had a weekend in August to go and visit our niece for her birthday and another weekend in September planned to visit our newest niece for her birthday. Did we really need to be going someplace else?

The Sunday before his next long weekend we sat in Church and listened to our Pastor talk about how God values what we do with our rest time just as much as what we do with our work time. He talked about how taking time out from our daily lives to rest and take vacations were OK and needed to recharge. After the sermon I turned to My Sweetie and said, "I guess we're going on vacation on Friday!!!"

The Boy was away at Church Camp and needed to be picked up by 5 on Friday. His camp is about an hour away from Hannibal, Missouri so that's where we headed. My Sweetie and I had camped as children with our families, but this was about to be our first camping trip with our kids.

In the 3 days we spent in Hannibal we hiked in a dry creek looking for rocks

Panned for gems and fossils

Visited with Becky and Tom

Watched the local baseball team, The Cavemen, in a game


Rented a "small" boat and cruised around Mark Twain Lake for a day

We visited a few beaches and swam and jumped in the lake


Toured the Mark Twain Cave

Visited a little train museum.

This was all in addition to all the camp stuff of cooking our own meals, falling asleep under the stars listening to the crickets and waking up to the birds and blue skies and enjoying a campfire.

The kids helped with camp chores without too much hesitation

Had a camp fire

We all had a GREAT time!


A couple of times during the trip My Sweetie said that this was a much better vacation than our St. Louis trip....He felt relaxed.

THAT in itself made the weekend so worth it.

I'm so glad for that little nudge that came in the form of a Sunday morning sermon that helped us to see just how much we needed a little rest from the day to day "happy chaos" of life and glad we took the time to rest, relax and enjoy our sweet family.