Butterpup and the Girly Girls – Part 4

 

Mornings during Girls Week are usually the quietest, most peaceful part of the day.  I rolled out of my comfortable bed and walked into the kitchen to be greeted by my beautiful wife’s sweet voice.

“The toilet’s clogged in the girls’ bathroom.”

Good morning to you too, Sweetheart.

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I spent a while working on the plugged pot but every effort was frustrated…and so was I.  Many years ago one of our sons had flushed a farm toy which jammed things up so badly that the only way to unclog it was to carefully break the toilet with a hammer, remove the toy, and glue the pot back together.

No, we didn’t give him back his toy.

Annie had the van loaded and breakfast made when I decided the clog would have to wait until we got back from taking the girls home.

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The Girly Girls cheerfully climbed into Ruby the van and we started off for the next part of the week.  We got to Van Buren by lunch time and drove through their McDonalds to save time.  Well, we would have saved time, if they had gotten our order right.  I entertained the ladies while Annie went in to get the parts of our order that we couldn’t live without.

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Our next stop was not far away, at Cave Spring.  The small park is a major attraction for our family.  The ladies who run the place are eminently patient with children and their endless questions.  They told us some of the history of the cave and its use during the Civil War, and lifted a hatch at one of their buildings to show us where runaway slaves hid in frigid spring water while following the historic underground railroad.  I guess there the escape route really was underground.

The ladies took us through the grotto.  Emma proved adept at spotting the cave salamanders and crawfish hiding in the cave.  The tour guide couldn’t even keep up with her.  Cave Spring, as its name implies, runs through the cave and is cold enough to deter our little adventurers from stepping off the boardwalk and doing some unscheduled exploring.  Luckily we didn’t see any bats.  I find them interesting but one flying above the girls’ heads could have caused them to stampede.

Outside the cave, the guide showed us some of the box turtles they are trying to save and protect from raccoons and other predators.  While we were looking at the fish in the nearby pond, a raccoon wandered by, paying scant attention to our presence.  Probably thinking about making a meal out of a baby box turtle I guess.

Our guide showed us through the museum filled with interesting rocks and minerals, and a few reptiles too.

With our interest piqued by the shiny crystals in the museum, the tour guide showed us the sand pits outside that were virtually glistening with the semi-precious stones and fossils hiding in the sand.  For a modest fee the girls were given cloth sacks they could fill with anything they found.  We stuffed them full of crystals, semi-precious gems, and fossil sharks’ teeth, and so much more.  Pfiefer even found a jewel that was already finished to hang from a necklace.

She proclaimed that it would be a great gift for her momma.

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Rocky Falls is one of the most beautiful spots in southern Missouri.  There were more people there than I have ever seen but we still managed to have fun.  The girls couldn’t decide if they were mermaids or water kitties.  Likewise, they weren’t sure if I was a seal or a walrus, but they agreed that my head needed to be covered with fine gravel from the bottom of the creek.  It didn’t stay on my head though.  Nope, it went into my shirt and down into my shorts and, well, you get the idea.

Swimming in the creek was a welcome relief from the intense heat.  The cold water wasn’t as welcome when I had to keep pouring it over my head to get rid of the gravel.

Yeah.

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The girls fell in love with the four-legged Clover at our next stop, Arnold’s Burgers in Mountain View.  Clover is the resident pot bellied pig.  She doesn’t live in the part of the restaurant where we ate, but in the room right next to it.  The owner keeps her pen meticulously clean though so there is no pig smell.

Arnold’s also has some novelty containers.  When you open the little wooden boxes a plastic spider jumps out at your hand.  It startled the girls the first time they opened it but none of them screamed.  No they waited to scream until the second, and third, and fourth…and so on.  Luckily there were not many other customers.

I tried to stop the girly girls from squealing and laughing but…  Have you ever heard the expression, “like trying to herd cats”?

Yeah.

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Back in Ruby we drove to Honeysuckle Inn.  Declaring that my snoring would keep them all awake, Annie had reserved a room for her and the girls, and a separate one for me.

It’s the first time I’ve been glad that I snore.  Well, only partly.

Annie and the girls talked until late into the night.  They kept begging her for “one more story”.  She gladly complied but, when they asked for a ghost story, she thought for a while to come up with the least scary ghost she could.  Who would have thought that the ghost of Goldilocks eating porridge could give little girls nightmares?  But it did.

Meanwhile, in my room, I took advantage of my single-occupant status to take a long, hot shower without hearing a chorus of, “Pa-a-a, hurry UP!”  Well, it was hot but it wasn’t long.  As I stepped into the tub, I observed that the floor of the bathtub was SLICK.   The way I noticed was that my foot inside the bath took an unplanned trip while the foot outside it decided to go the other way.  My left knee twisted and I found myself straddling the side of the tub.  My female readers may not have picked up on the cues but male readers are already wincing in pain.

Yes, I did.

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As we made the short journey to Springfield, Missouri the next morning we stopped off at the Wild Animal Safari in Strafford.  They have over 100 acres that is home for dozens of species of large animals.  We road an open-sided bus around the paved trail and fed animals we would not otherwise have been safe around.  Watusi cattle, American bison, elk, buffalo, etc, etc, etc.

Next we took a tour of their walk-through zoo and got to feed a young giraffe and its mother.  Wisely, the girls chose to elect me as giraffe feeder because the beautiful animals tend to slobber, a LOT, when they eat.

We got to see a momma lemur with her two tiny babies and, being Mizzou fans, we really enjoyed the tigers.

A prize of their choice from the gift shop and a meal in the little diner and the girls were ready to go to Scotty and Erin’s house.  Pfiefer was ready to see her parents and her little brother, Payden.  Yeah, Annie and I were too.

Someone set up the Slip-n-Slide and the girls had a great time, well, slipping and sliding.

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We left Pfiefer with her family and took the other three girls to Emma’s other grandparents’ house.  Dan and Marna were throwing a barbecue and most of their family was in for the family time.  Our son, Travis, his wife, Danielle, and our grandson, John, were their too.  Our son, J.B., and wife, Candi, joined the festivities and we had a great time eating Dan’s delicious barbecue and visiting with good friends and relatives.

The only thing that tempered the fun was the knowledge that we were at the end of our journey.

Don’t get me wrong, Annie and I were tired.  Four or five energetic little girls can wear out a couple old people pretty quick.  We had long ago reached that point, so we were kind of ready for some rest.  We’d relax and get reacquainted with each other on the trip home.  By the time we got there we knew we would be making plans for next year’s Boys Week and Girls Week.

And we knew that walking through our door into a quiet house we would be struck with the loneliness of our grandchildren’s absence.  The sadness would hit.

Of course, I still had that clogged toilet to look forward to.

Yee ha.

 

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(above) The last video compilation of our week’s activities.

(below) I put together some of the dancing I was able to capture.