A couple of weeks ago we went on a little family vacation to Branson, MO. We kind of took some back roads since it was the most direct route our GPS guided us to the Talking Rocks Cavern on the west side of Branson. We happened across a happy accident in southwest Missouri on a bathroom stop in part of the Mark Twain national forest.
There's a state park called Roaring River, there was a bathroom we could see from the road and there was a nice, big playground on the other side of the parking lot...perfect after 3 1/2 hours in the car. As we walked to the playground we noticed a guy walk down an embankment and we heard some distant noise of water. There was this pretty, little, spring-fed mountain river that was very shallow, totally clear and moving very slowly (in that part). This turned out to be our favorite part of the trip and made sure to stop there on the way home. We'll put up another post with some pictures from the other days.
The kids liked Talking Rocks Cavern. It's the first cave they've been in. There were some pretty formations. I've never heard of "cave bacon" before, but you can see why, and this cave is famous for it's bacon!
Yes, that fish was alive...though just barely. It was floating belly-up, but I could see it was still breathing. I think someone upstream must have had it on a stringer for a while and weeded it out before they headed home. The kids enjoyed touching and holding it (and it makes a pretty cool mountain man photo!).
