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The Lake 2004-05-16, 11:59 p.m. For months, T and I have been planning a long weekend getaway to the Lake of the Ozarks. We were going to be total tourists and sleep late and have absolutely no plans upon arrival. We got back late this afternoon and we had a pretty good time, given our shitty relationship. We made reservations at a B&B that was a large house on a cliff overlooking the lake. It was a gorgeous home and the owners were two of the nicest, most hospitable people I’ve ever met. T went to work on Friday and I took the day off to use up some vacation before my busy season at work got too hellish to be away. We ended up leaving around 5:30 Friday night, which put us right smack in rush hour/Royals game traffic on I-70. By the time we actually got out of the metro area, it was after 7:00, and I hadn’t eaten anything since early in the morning, so I was quickly becoming cranky and tired. I may or may not have bitten his head off a dozen times on the way to our destination, but in my defense, he totally deserved it. We finally got to the B&B around 10 p.m., dropped off our stuff, and went to dinner at a dive bar that a co-worker had told me about. The food was awesome and dirt cheap, but the entertainment deserves a place in this story. The sign outside the bar said they were featuring live music, so we thought it must be a band. We were so very wrong. The live entertainment was a guy with a karaoke machine, and he was singing terribly off-key and not even a little bit ironically. He was singing country music, with his karaoke machine, not even close to being on-pitch, and people were paying him actual cash money tips because they loved it. People were dancing. People were singing along. People were requesting songs. We were baffled and yet, we could not leave and go do something that was actually fun, because this pathetic bad-singer guy was so funny to watch. We finally rolled into bed around 2 a.m. and woke up around 9 the next morning for breakfast, and oh my god, was it good. The food was just fantastic – we had peach crepes, quiche, and fresh fruit brought to us on Saturday morning, and egg casserole, blueberry-orange muffins, and fresh fruit this morning, and I nearly licked my plate, it was all that good. Our room was pretty incredible and very spacious. The bed faced an electric fireplace, which was built into the wall between the bedroom and bathroom so that it was also visible from the Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom. All of the windows in the bedroom had spectacular views of the lake and it was so pretty at sunrise and sunset. We also had a small living room space outside our room, and an outdoor deck available to use, but for some reason we really didn’t use them. The bed was the most comfortable bed I have ever slept on in my entire life. I could not get out of it, and I wanted to put the pillows in my suitcase and bring them home. It was perfection.
T is obsessed with horses, so I decided I didn’t really want to sit down painlessly for the next three days, and so I would go horseback riding with him. He’s a city boy and is just fascinated by farm animals, and since I grew up in a small town, I am pretty indifferent to them. Anyway, I was the shortest adult at the stables by about six inches, and I had to stand on a box to even reach the stirrups on my horse. We really did have fun, even though my ass still hurts. After we rode horses for a couple hours, we went to one of the marinas near our B&B and went paddleboating. We just wanted to hang out on the water and enjoy the gorgeous weather without the hassle of a speedboat and dealing with unfamiliar water and crazy drunk people, so we decided to make our own fun with a paddleboat. We had a blast tooling around the coves at one end of the lake, people-watching, and drinking beer. We went back to our room and took a nap and then got dressed up and went out for dinner at a semi-fancy restaurant with the absolute worst service I have ever had at a place that didn’t have a drive-thru. I’m going to get all het up again if I rehash the experience, but I’ll be sure to publish my complaint letter to the management after I write to them this week. We got back to our room around eleven and soaked our sore selves in the Jacuzzi one last time before we hit the bed. Luckily, I thought ahead and brought a couple bottles of wine along on the trip, so we got quite tanked very quickly. I remember silently cursing our hosts this morning when they knocked on our door and woke us up at 9:30. The trip back was…well, it was shitty. I’ll write about that later, because I think it’s pretty funny and ridiculous in retrospect, but anyway, but we stopped at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place on the way back and marveled again at how cheap food is in central Missouri, and then we kept driving and got into a huge fight and then he decided to come straight to my place to watch some old shows on my TiVo and then I made dinner and we were barely speaking and I drove him home, and then I totally lost it in my car after I dropped him off and yes, he’s really dead to me right now and I’ll write about the rest of it later because it makes me so goddamn angry that I let him get to me like that. The return trip aside, it was a lovely weekend and exactly what I needed – I feel well-rested for the first time in months. I’m focusing on the next big thing in my Summer of Fun, which is a trip to Oklahoma over Memorial Day weekend to hang out with part of Redheads + 1 . A girls’ weekend sounds just heavenly after spending the last three days with T.
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