Lake-o-rama

Time flies when you are having fun. Last Tuesday we packed the van up to the gills and headed south to Beaver Lake, just east of Rogers, Arkansas. Yes, Arkansas. It is a cultural adventure but worth it for the scenery alone - the lake was beautiful. We stayed in a large house on a cove near Lost Bridge Marina & camping area. It was on the quiet side of the lake - almost exactly halfway between Rogers & Eureka Springs. Great spot for those who are more interested in nature and water vs. than nightlife/lots of people. Anyway, our house was pretty nice and plenty big for my brother's family of 8 and us...that is except for the fact that it didn't have working smoke detectors (we discovered this the first night when I went to preheat the oven & accidently started a grease fire inside it!) and the seemingly less strict building codes for decks (the rails were about 8 in apart - plenty wide for Luke to walk through face first...off into the treed abyss!). Good thing we 'cleaned' the oven the first night...and the sliding glass doors were heavy enough that Luke couldn't let himself outside to check out the deck without help. We adjusted just fine.

Of course, the main focus of the week was not the house but the water. Beaver Lake is a Corps of Engineers lake - deep and very clear, so much so that it is popular for scuba divers! Houses 'on' the lake tend to be set pretty far back up in the trees, and only some of them have docks (not ours - we tied up in the cove each evening and waded out to the boat). It wasn't crowded at all, esp where we were, so the boat was busy pretty much all day every day pulling our crowd of wakeboarders, tubers, and our new toy - the wake skate.

The wake-skate is like a wakeboard but without bindings (things to hold your feet on). Daniel took right to it ...as you can see below...he even pulled off a 'push-shove-it' trick before anyone else, which was a really cool thing for him (hard to be the 'first' on anything with two older brothers).

Everyone else got lots of 'air' as they attempted their stunts...the older ones (John & David) would limp slowly back to the house and down a couple Advil between runs so they could keep going despite their bad knees. Kelly & I took the kids to the swimming areas, fished, went along on boat rides occasionally, and generally held down the house with Luke & whoever was taking a break from the water. Unfortunately, Josh came down with a mysterious fever on day 2 so he hung out with us quite a bit. He was an awfully good sport though.

When we tired of boating, we headed out for grocery (and boat) shopping...and one day we headed over to Eureka Springs to explore. The adults could have spent more time there but the boys quickly tired of art galleries and gift shops, although they liked the leather/biker stores and thought the hippies in Basin Park were pretty interesting!

Our last day we rented a pontoon boat so that everyone could be on the water at once. We loaded Josh up with Advil and he stayed in the shade and drove to all the cool swimming spots for us, while John and David took the rest of the crowd out on the faster boat. We had a ball, as you can see from the expression on Luke's face!!

We headed back for our respective homes Sunday morning. Though the Evans clan didn't get very far - we made what I thought would be a quick stop at a boat dealer in Rogers that led to us eating lunch at the marina there (a really yummy, casual diner-style place on the water we would highly recommend) and taking a very nice Malibu wake-setter boat out for a test drive. It was really fun actually - although I am now worried Michael aspires to be a boat dealer since his perception is the job is mostly entertaining people with deep pockets by driving very cool boats around the lake (and of course getting noticed by girls in bikinis in the process). He might not be that far off base, but if it was THAT good, wouldn't we all be doing it??

All in all a terrific family vacation. Now it's time to get back to real life!