Family Vacation - Ozark, Missouri

We are really enjoying our visit with our friends the Porters here in Ozark. They have a great house on a wooded 5 acre lot. There is a small pond behind the house that is stocked with perch, bass and cat fish. Our friend Jeff who worked as an engineer for the Navy back in CA is now working for them out of the house here in Ozark. He has a great little home office with a view of the wooded pond. He feels so blessed to be in such a beautiful and peaceful spot. Sunday morning we had a nice slow start to the day. All the kids took advantage of the opportunity to sleep in for some much needed rest. Anita prepared a yummy breakfast of eggs, bacon and the famous Porters biscuits and gravy.

We spend the middle park of the day down at the pond fishing. Alex and Catie joined the three Porter kids, Zach, Sarah and Andrew casting night crawlers. Jeff had put out a $5 reward for the biggest fish so that got all the kids motivated. Everyone caught at least 1 fish, but the big winner was Alex, both in the number of fish caught (I lost track but think it was around 7) as well as the biggest (a 10 inch large mouth bass). So, AJ is now $5 richer and a semi professional Bass fisherman!

Our dinner plan was to eat at a Lambert's Cafe, a fun family style place known for the Throwed Roll. They have a kid that is in charge to serving hot dinner rolls to the patrons by flinging them across the room! You'd better not drop one, it's not good form it you do. This is probably the most popular restaurant in Ozark, so there can be pretty long waits. When we put our name in, we found it would be 90 minutes before our table was ready. So, Jeff, Nik, Andrew and I did a few local Geocaches. The Iron Giant was a cool cache hidden on a the undercarriage of an old rail road caboose. The Historic Weaver House cache has some very interesting civil war history around it. And The Beginning of the End cache taught us about a rather dark period the history of Ozark.

The caching helped us to kill the waiting time and we arrived in time to get our table. The whole atmosphere at Lambert's was a blast. On top of the roll tossing, they had servers wandering around dishing out bottomless portions of Fried Okra, Grilled Potatoes and Tomato Mac and Cheese. Also, if you finish your entree' and are still hungry, you can order a second a no extra charge! The only person that did was little Andrew who a second serving of Hog Jowls. MMMmmm good!