Harrison, AR and Branson, MO

We've been busy finishing up our work on the house. Mike actually got four days off in a row so we took a mini-vacation up-state! We stayed in Harrison (in the Ozark Mountains), close to caverns, Branson, MO, and a lot of Arkansas we haven't seen yet!.

HARRISON:

Our Hotel

Inside Mystic Caverns. This is called the Wedding Cake.

During the prohibition, people came into this cave and put a  big wooden dance floor  down right over this water. They had a distillery in the next room. You can still see the groves from the where the dance floor hit the walls and smoke damage from the distillery.

This the Crystal Bell. (inside Crystal Dome Cavern)

We had our own private tour on the first cave!

Natural Bridge

 BRANSON:

Largest toy store in the world.

Largest Titanic museum in the world! Took us three hours to get through. A ton of artifacts and full size replicas of rooms and corridors!

The man on the volcano is missing a leg...it's in the Dino's mouth.

LITTLE ROCK:

We let our weeds get a little long...

New lawn mower!

Making curtains for the kitchen.

My first cheesecake! Delicious!

New House!

The past month has been a whirl-wind for us! I ventured to Portland to meet our beautiful new niece, Olivia. And the day after returning to Little Rock we signed papers to buy our new house! Two days later we moved in and started to get settled down. After three weeks in the house we have made many improvements, including some fresh paint and a new kitchen floor! After moving in we finally received our household goods, only two weeks later. Now we have all sorts of things to make our house a home.

Lunch on move in day.

Cleaning the carpet.

Hallway. Note the light fixture.

Kitchen

The woman we bought the house from left her dog with us for a few hours. We weren't sure she was coming back for her!

All of our stuff fit in one room that first day.

Fireplace in the living room.

From the street.

First visitor. About an inch and a half long. GROSS.

We bought a dremel...

...to remove these. We hack-sawed through them, until I broke the hack-saw. The nails were sticking out of the wood pointed up. So we removed all of the bars, cut and ground the nails and re-stained the wood.

So much better! Note the new kitchen floor as well!

Living room with furniture.

Old light fixtures.

New light fixtures! Mike only got shocked once while changing them, before he turned off the power. We labeled the circuit breakers that day too:)

Spray painted all 16 door nobs inside. Silver is new.

It was raining really hard this day. We lost power for 12 hours.

The cause of no power

Mike installing our new dryer. (Lowes did it wrong!)

One our way to dinner with friends.

Just what it says. 

We have lots of visitors in our back yard.

Catching some sun.

Dragonfly after rain.

Mike left the bird seed on the porch. 

Turtle! There were a couple that day. We don't know where they came from.