Off the Beaten in Branson

Branson, Mo is a popular tourist spot.  Music, comedy, shopping and all kinds of activities draw people to this Ozark spot. Our family time at Branson was very special since we found things off the beaten path that  most tourist would never see.  Most of these side features came about because the Beyer children are home schooled  and the family volunteers at camp Sagrada, a summer camp for children of incarcerated parents.

Home schooled kids seem to be magnetized. We visited the shop of Art Reed in the Mill Wheel Crafter's mall.  Two teenagers, Okie and Rocky were helping the instrument maker in his shop.  The Beyers and the Teske youth struck up a conversation that led to an impromptu concert.

That led to information  about a jam session that happens every Monday night at Brunner, Mo.

The jam session at Brunner is held at a school house that celebrated its 100th birthday this year.  It has been 50 years since it was used as a school and it had to be renovated by neighbors to make it a pleasant community center.  We found it with about 15 musicians jamming a very friendly audience.

Back to the Beyer's  Sagrada friends; they are the Lingner family and they normally play at the Branson Landing on Saturdays.  The kids called to get time and place and learned that the extreme heat was canceling their street performance but they invited us to their church and to have Sunday lunch at their house.  We said yes to both and we are glad we did.

Their church met in a beautiful chapel, The Chapel at Integrity Hills. The chapel overlooked Table Rock Lake and was built to the Glory of the Lord by Rob Voss, a former Executive Vice President of Walmart.  The message that Rob heard from the Lord is printed on the wall.

We finised that rememberable Sunday afternoon with a private concert by the Lingners in their home in Northern Arkansas.

These experiences made our vacation in Branson a very special get away!

Oklahoma!

 We attended the National Association of County Agricultural Agent's 2010 Annual Meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  We enjoyed spending time with Karen (she was a section chair) and Neal who came in for the last part of the meeting.  We had many interesting side trips.

The first was a visit to Will Roger's boyhood home.(above)

The visit to the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial was a very emotional Experience. A feature of the memorial is a reflecting pool with "doors" or passage ways on either end. On one the time 9:01 is inscribed: on the other, 9:03.  In the narrative it is explained in that brief passage of time
168 people lost their lives and all of our lives were changed forever.

A large chair was erected on the lawn to memorialize each adult who lost their life;  19 small chairs were erected for the children killed in the day care center.

The somber mood of the trip was brightened by the spectacular art at the Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and a fun time at Discoveryland back in Tulsa.  At Discoveryland we had a great steak, saw the OSU mascot, a black Quarter Horse, and enjoyed the singing/dance troupe as they performed a sample of the musical, Oklahoma and other Western classics.
Our surprise discovery was an excellent restaurant spot on 2nd Street just up the street from our hotel. We wouldn't have gone in without a recommendation but the Blue Dome Diner is now on our recommended list!
While the side trips were great, a highlight for Curtis was to be present when his major professor from Oklahoma State, Dr. Bob Totusek, received the Service to World Agriculture Award.  He accepted in his humble way and made some significant remarks that implied useful guidelines for Land Grant Universities. He expressed dismay that he received awards for jobs he was paid to do.  After he was my major professor he served as Animal Science Chairman. A former student reported that Dr. Totusek introduced every Animal Science teacher at the start of each class.  His wife of 62 years accompanied him at the presentation.

Cozy Cottage is filling the need

We call the renovated Poff House, "The Cozy Cottage." We purchased and renovated the little house to provide a comfortable environment for family, friends, and guests.  We have tried to make the cottage a place where family, friends, or guest want to spend some of their vacation time while visiting family members or friends as well as visiting some of the natural and historical attractions in the area.  We've tried to furnish it with surplus and used furniture to keep it affordable for short-term renters.  Family comes first when it comes to use of the Cozy Cottage.  Friends of family can rent it for even less than the already competitive rates.

The living room  and master bed room has been furnished with antiques and family hand-me-downs to preserve the feel of an old but simple farm house.

A second bedroom has a bunk bed with a full size mattress on the bottom and a twin on top.

The Cozy Cottage actually has two featured living areas. One is the front porch furnished with Cracker Barrel  rocking chairs and a panoramic view of the mountains.

A carport was converted to a "family port" with vaulted ceilings and a flat screen television.

The Cozy Cottage is already serving its purpose.  Families have stayed there while visiting the grand parents.  Several families have spent some of their vacation in Blacksburg because of the house.   A family was there for the funeral of a loved one.  A family celebrated a daughter's graduation and a family has  used it as headquarters for a wedding.   The Cottage has been shared by couples  on a football week end. And we hope their will be more.


Grandson Joshua McCulley is  developing a website,
http://www.cozycottagevirginia.weebly.com 
and we have a blog, http://www.blacksburgvacation.blogspot.com ,
where we archive stories about people, places and events  around the area.
We hope you can visit either electronically or physically.

Garden Memories

Gardening is so much fun in the spring!  Reading seed catalogs has always been a problem for me-I buy more varieties and seed than I could ever plant or cultivate.  But the promise of a bountiful crop and the generally pleasant working weather makes putting in a garden an exhilarating experience.  The first harvest is exciting.

Dad, Bill Absher, really was a master gardener.

Near our Kentucky home is a farm called "June Rich Farm."  That is so descriptive of the season.  As I harvested vegetables and flowers this weekend so many gardening memories flooded my mind.  Dad taught me to garden.  I can remember picking green beans and hauling them on my American Flyer  wagon to the Bluegrass Market in Blacksburg to make a cash sale.  I probably got $0.50 or $1 for my labor and I was pleased.  Dad was always a good gardener even though he work long and hard during the day.  Until he retired he did most of his gardening in the cool of the before-breakfast-time.  Years of building the soil with compost and picking up the big rocks made his garden spot a productive area.  But the deer figured that out to so he had a 6 feet high chain link fence built to protect his crops. Mom called it his "play pen."

Dad's example made me think I needed a garden wherever we lived.  I remember the kids liked to help pick peas but I don't think many made it to the table.  They loved to eat the peas straight out of the hull.
Beth wonders if they were told not to eat the peas on purpose or to get them to eat them since they wouldn't eat cooked ones off the plate.  She said she and David would take turns standing guard and eating peas.  She remembers this happening at our Nicholasville house on Main Street.  Our garden there was mostly on sub-soil and was exposed to all travelers on busy Highway 27 before the by-pass was completed.  Our dentist, Dr. Henkle, monitored our garden and had something to say about it at every visit.

I didn't get into flower gardening much until we moved to Hamlet Hill.  Barbara joined a gardening club and developed a real passion for growing and arranging flowers.  In fact she did the flowers for Chilton Reynolds' wedding about six weeks before she died.  For that event she was more or less the "executive arranger" with Beth and Cindy doing a lot of the work.  Barbara died June 27, 2000.  Flowers were in full bloom.  We got one of her friends to arrange the casket bouquet using as many flowers from our garden as she could.  She used daylilies and refreshed them and hosta blooms, which I had never seen used as cut flowers as well as daisies and a variety of flowers that we had accumulated.  JoAnn Walla and Ruth Warner had given us a lot of plants.

I vividly remember going to the garden early the Sunday morning after Barbara's funeral.  The hymn,"In the garden" rang in my heart's ears.  Then Helmet rode by on his horse and said something to lift my spirits.  But, actually my spirits were pretty high at that point since I knew my wife of 37 years was no longer suffering and was probably in the Lord's garden, and as the verse of that hymn says, "he walks with me and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,  And they Joy we share..."

We were gone  this year when daylilies started blooming.  Beth liked to keep tabs on their progress.  She would generally tell us when the first one would bloom, how many had bloomed the second and third days, and usually by the fourth day there would be too many to count.  The daylilies at the end of the house are the only ones planted by the "book."  They came from the Warners and I dug a trench, put sand in the bottom, and did what Southern Living advised.  The cultured lilies along the patio came from Nancy Bowling and they were just planted my way, but they seem to be doing fine.

Kaye and I have really enjoyed gardening together.  One raised bed we developed (or are developing)
we call our "Memory Garden."  It has plants, plaques, figurines, and rocks that have  special meaning to us.

There are two rose bushes in the bed.  One was one I gave Barbara, maybe for Mother's Day some year. It provide rose buds for her for most of the last month of her life.  The other rose bush came from the Sunday School class at NUMC when Kaye's mother died.  I'm afraid what was grafted on did not survive and what we have now is from the vigorous root stock.  There is a statue that the Mikschs gave us as a wedding gift, and a plaque about gardens that was a gift to Barbara. There are geodes from one of the Beyer's Missouri homes, and some petrified wood that Jacob Beyer gave us from Arizona.

There is a statue of a boy on a turtle's back that came from Kaye's home place in Tulsa.

We are still adding memories to that and other beds.