Alaska 2014: Day 147: Hiking in Branson

September 8, 2014

This morning was a little cloudy with temps in the 60's. The clouds cleared later in the morning and it was a bright sunny day with high of about 84.

We started the morning with a 7:30 devotion with the Bishop of Arkansas bringing the message. As was last evening's service, it was very good. Both of these Bishops are excellent preachers. After the message we again had pancakes for breakfast with the entire group. Don't think we mentioned this before - there are 317 Nomads attending the conference. Today was the day for various sightseeing trips to the surrounding areas. We decided that since this was our only free day left before we get back to Alabama that we needed to get some exercise rather than ride a bus all day. We will be in classes most of the day the next 3 days. We went to the Lakeside Forest Wilderness Area to go hiking. It is “140 acres of wooded hill country that has been set aside to preserve an area of the natural Ozarks that have attracted tourists for many years.” It is a lovely area but we were somewhat disappointed in the lack of good trail markings. At places they were very well marked and at other crossings there was nothing. Fortunately we had a map of sorts and didn't get lost. We did decide that we are ready to go back to Alaska. It is not nearly as much fun hiking with heat, humidity, snakes and poison ivy. Oh, and spiders! Poor Scout got so hot and tired. He was so funny climbing up on a rock with a little bitty puddle on top and trying to lay down in it. He was so pitiful that when we left the park we went to Table Rock Park to the boat launch and let him swim a while. We think he would have been quite content to stay there the rest of the day. Table Rock is a large Corp of Engineers lake. Very nice! If we had found it earlier we might have gone boating today. We will have to remember this lake for future travels. We finally talked Scout into getting back into the truck and went home for showers and dinner. We did make a quick trip to the outlet stores tonight, but did not find anything we wanted to bring home. That's it for today. Tomorrow the seminar classes start.