It is our One Hundredth Day of Quarantine.
Technically, we have not been in this house for 100 days. We did take a Quarantine Vacation, subtitled, The Same Five People, Just In A Different House. We generally do a weeklong vacation the first week of the boys’ summer break – Big Bend last year, a different place in Texas the year before, in 2017 my two biggest boys went to Ireland for a month and I went to – SURPRISE – Texas for a couple days (to meet my baby nephew), in 2016 we went to the beach . . . you get the idea. We had a trip to Disney World planned for this year, but obviously the Mouse was not happening in 2020, RIP Disney’s bottom line. As a consolation prize, the Prof found us a remote cabin in Broken Bow, Oklahoma near the Ouachita National Forest, and we headed up there for some swimming and hiking and trips out for socially distanced ice cream and BBQ.
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I’m not kidding when I say that after 5pm on Friday I received no less than FOUR (4) (f-o-u-r!!) new COVID-19 OSHA complaints that had a 2-3 day turnaround. I sighed for all the vacations I have lost over the years, and scheduled some early morning calls for every morning we were there in the hopes that I could corral most of the work into the mornings. I barely slept Friday night, so anxious about how I was going to manage to get us all packed and out the door and also working but also present for the vacation with the boys so they have memories of me there and sad that I couldn’t just get a damn rest already and AUGH. Not great.
On Saturday morning, it took all morning to pack. The boys peppered me with questions until I was half mad with annoyance, trying to do four things at once and getting interrupted by a fifth. I got all the clothes and swimsuits and pjs and undies packed up, and the shoes and hats and sunscreen, and the river floaties and the masks and sanitizer and then the wipes, while they orbited around me like satellites and say “Hey Mom” a hundred times.
I planned to cook most of our meals at the cabin, to save money and reduce corona risk, so after packing the suitcases I headed into the kitchen to pack up our instant pot and some supplies. On the menu was red beans and rice, spaghetti, enchiladas. I packed up the dried goods, parceling out some Tony Cachere’s and thyme and bay leaves into a small Tupperware, sticking some celery and bell peppers in our cooler. I measured out a spice pack for spaghetti, and one for black bean and corn enchiladas, pulled cans of corn and Ro-tel and containers of chicken stock into a paper grocery bag. I was struck at the time by how this task wearied and annoys me and also pleased me deeply, both at once. Isn’t that funny. I like doing most of the things I am required to do in my life – I just often find myself wishing I didn’t have to do quite so many of them in so little time.
Anyway, we stuffed the car with small tupperwares of cumin/chili powder/oregano plus slightly larger tupperwares of sour cream and cherry tomatoes, some sour cream coffee cakes I made last night to bring with us (one cinnamon, one cherry, one blueberry), and we were off to Broken Bow Lake in Oklahoma. It is a relatively secluded place, and we were hopeful that we would not encounter any kind of lake of the Ozarks nonsense, and that it would be a relaxing break free of coronavirus anxiety. Swimming, hiking, hot tubbing, etc.
We arrived at our cabin around dinnertime, and the boys boiled out of the car and swarmed all over the place. It’s a lovely cedar-paneled, high ceilinged vacation cabin, with a king bed in a loft at the top of a set of stairs where the boys stay, and a queen in a downstairs bedroom that we claimed. There is a fully appointed kitchen, and I brought my instant pot. Two faux leather couches, a wall-mounted tv, and a hot tub (that, spoiler alert, never gets hot). Wraparound porch, surrounded by really varied foliage – pine and deciduous and cactus, all mixed together. The sundown view was phenomenal and I drank a bourbon on ice and breathed the Oklahoma air, while the boys swam in what Craiggy dubbed “the freeze tub.” (Get it? Hot tub that isn’t hot?)
On Sunday morning, we woke and sipped coffee on the porch, while the boys splashed in the freeze tub. I had my first work client call that morning, so I prepared for the call and took it. That job over, we all headed off in the car to Hochatown to find some BBQ for lunch. We saw very occasional masks, far fewer people wore them than in New Orleans, and it’s so odd. We still wore ours, and stayed out of indoor places except a quick dash into the BBQ place to order and then again to pick up.
We took our BBQ lunch over to Beaver’s Bend State Park, in search of a picnic table to eat it on. Ultimately, we ended up sitting in the back of the Pilot, as there were no picnic tables to be found. The boys were eager to swim in the lake and somewhat upset to have to eat lunch first, and so they put the Prof and me on trial. Jack was the judge, Liam was lawyer for the prosecution, and I was both defense lawyer and defendant. We had a lot of fun with this while the Prof drove up and down various twisty state park roads in the fruitless search for a picnic table. I did the normal objections (Object! Assumes facts not in evidence! Objection! Calls for speculation!), and they laughed and laughed. Liam almost immediately improved his skills at crafting questions, doing better at questioning than some long-serving lawyers I’ve met. We had a good time with it. Liam’s prosecutorial theory was that I was delaying the swimming because we had to wait after eating lunch before swimming, but I trapped him with the Breakfast Defense (i.e. if we’d gone first thing in the morning we’d have had to wait after eating breakfast as well).
Outside the BBQ place 
Fake Jail 
Keep them in there 
Snort 
Craig Made a Chip Butty 
His Happy Place 
“picnic table”
After lunch, we drove back to the cabin and changed into our swimsuits, then gathered up towels and a couple of floaties and boogie boards, and headed to the hike down to the lake. As it turned out, the trail is not well maintained and we had to do some bushwacking. Green moss, thorny vines, mud – we slipped and slid and got scratched and a little bit lost. It also didn’t help that the lake was 10 feet higher than normal, only 8 feet lower than flood stage, and at one point our path was fully washed out. The boys and I sat on a log to wait while the Prof explored to see if we could go around. I taught the boys about shelf fungus (it always wants to be parallel to the ground, so if it’s growing on a tree and the tree falls, it is perpendicular. It does not like this and will eventually scooch itself sideways to be parallel again.)
We had to bushwack around the washout to get to the trail on the other side, and Liam swore he saw a snake. I picked my way through tall grasses somewhat nervously, but aside from a few ticks, we made it through unaccosted.
We reached a hillside and while the trees still had trail blazes marking an alleged path, there was almost no discernible path to be seen. We stubbornly tromped our way down to the lakefront . . . only to find that the beach has been entirely drowned in the high water. I was dismayed, but the Prof was undeterred. I laid a large towel on the tall grasses to flatten them and create a small staging area for us. It was not particularly graceful but we ended up in the water on our floaties, Jack overly cautious (“I’m concerned for my safety!”) and me wearing my pants because I forgot to take them off until I was already in.
We had to launch over that grass to get in. 
Prof was first. 
Jack was l-a-s-t 
Craig on the giant towel, in “face form” 
Craig in “eating form” (???? I don’t know) 
Jack still hesitating on the shore 
After swim 
A nice day
They clambered all over us, occasionally nearly drowning me because they were convinced my feet brushing against their legs were sharks/alligators. The Prof had brought our bluetooth JBL Clip speaker, and we played classic rock from the shore while floating in warm, murky, kinda boggy, extremely deep water. Craig was in a lifejacket (the only one, although all of us had floatation devices so we didn’t have to tread water), and he also had a small boogie board, and dang if he wouldn’t let that thing drift off into the distance, or get tangled up in the logs on the shore (we always made him go fetch it, and he would, intrepid little explorer). It was rustic out there, for sure, but we had a great time.
Then it was time to make the return trip, back tromping up the non-path to the top of the hill, then through the washout, and then slipping and sliding up the mossy part that we had slip-slid down hours prior. The boys were All Set at this point, and although we made them each carry their own towel and boogie board on the way down, on the way up I ended up a pack mule, carrying almost all of it including, eventually, Craig himself (the Prof had our heavy bag, both ways). Once we reached the top of the path, we were pretty filthy and scratched, and also covered in ticks as it turned out. Upon arrival home, we had to do tick-check and removal. The boys switched swimsuits and got back in the freeze tub while I ran everything through the wash. I made spaghetti in the instant pot, and we talked that night about what our favorite memories were from the day. Liam recalled the painful trail with “lots of twists and turns and hard to get to places,” but “the lake was cool.” Jack remembered “a very bad time” with the hike (nobody liked the hike), but loved swimming in the lake. Craig liked “going to sleep” and “swimming in the freeze tub.” The Prof’s favorite part was listening to classic rock playing on the shore, floating on the lake, and playing fetch with Craig with a floating piece of driftwood. I loved freaking the kids out by tickling them with my feet so they thought I was a giant monster swimming up from the depths to snatch them.
That night, we roasted marshmallows over a fire outside to make S’mores, and then all went to bed early. We put the two Littles to bed upstairs – Craig alone in the king, and Liam on his cot and sleeping bag on the floor. I read some chapters of the Ickabog to Liam and Craiggy, and then headed downstairs to watch Father Brown in my downstairs queen bed with Jack. While we were down there, Liam got spooked in his sleeping bag and stole Jack’s spot on the king, so when we got upstairs Jack was NOT happy and complained loudly at his brothers, snoring and taking up the entire bed. I laughed and laughed – turnabout is fair play, bud. (We shoved Craig over, and he kept rolling back, and Jack was apoplectic. Ultimately he got Craig shoved to the middle, and the three of them did just fine in the KING BED, spoiled children).
The following morning it was Monday, and I had yet another work call scheduled for 9am, followed by drafting a quick position statement. The boys watched Ice Age and then went out to the un-hot hot tub, while I worked on my paper on the porch and the Prof piled up stuff by the edge of the wraparound porch so Virgil could hang out there with us without escaping. The Prof made bacon for breakfast, and the boys ate an entire box of cereal, and I had cherry sour cream coffee cake with my bacon and coffee. At one point, after many failed tests, Virgil made it over the doggy barricade of stuff at the end of the porch in an extremely graceless move. Because he is old, he got to the other side and then sat down, too surprised at his success to run off. We immediately fetched him and return him to the other side of the barricade.
After I finally finished my draft statement and sent it out for review, we were ready to pile in the car and take a scenic drive. I packed up PB & Js and grapes and chips for our lunch. While I was putting together our picnic hamper, the boys knocked on the kitchen window from the hot tub. Since the window didn’t open and I couldn’t hear them, I had to walk across the house to the back door and all the way around the wraparound porch to where the hot tub was tucked in the back corner, only to find as I turned the corner that they were all holding their breath under the water. Ah, I see. A Hilarious Prank. “Mom, were you scared we disappeared?” Ha. Ha. This was the first of many kitchen window knocks, and so I started to just ignore it and eventually after five minutes of knocking, a boy (usually Craig) would stalk into the house, dripping wet, look of consternation on his face, and shout “we were KNOCKING FOREVER!” in an entitled manner. I wish that dang window opened.
We took a scenic drive for the rest of the day, stopping at a state park to eat our packed lunch at a picnic table, where the boys took turns insisting they had to poop so that the Prof and I had to take turns driving them each down the road to use the public toilets. No way we could have CONSOLIDATED this bathroom trip, boys. However, irritating as it was to have our lunch interrupted multiple times, the drive was stunning, and we pulled over to see the views in several scenic overlooks, although I could never capture a great picture that pleased me. On the way back to the cabin, the boys fell asleep a while.
I made enchiladas for dinner that night. More Ickabog, more Father Brown, a little bit of reading, and then it was sleepy time.
Tuesday after yet another work call and position statement draft (ugh, WHY), we had planned to take the path down to the lake again. Having experienced it once, though, we knew that was not going to work, so we decided to drive to swim at a more beachy type place. It wasn’t super crowded, so it was easy to social distance there. However, this particular spot must have been fed by a nearby runoff because it was f-f-f-f-f-reezing. Hoo boy, was it cold. The boys swam a few hours, though I mostly stayed out since it was too cold.
Scenic drive lunch 
Swimming 
Freeeeeeze 
They were undeterred by the low temps
That night, the Prof picked up pizza for dinner. Everyone was exhausted, so after eating pizza and another round of Ickabog/Father Brown (every night, you guys, even here), they were all asleep very quickly. I managed a quick snap of the sunset on our last night, before sitting down to finish up some work.
The Prof planned for our drive home Wednesday to include a short side trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Now, I was game for this, but not expecting it to be as charming and delightful as it is. We packed everything up and said good bye to our cabin and king bed and freeze tub and all, and a few hours later we were in Hot Springs, the cutest little former-bathing town you ever did see. I’m a bit outta steam so I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.
We arrived home late on Wednesday night. And we’ve been here ever since! It was a nice break in the monotony of days, that little trip, and though I wish the hot tub had gotten hot and the path to the lake had been a little more clear, it was still a pretty great adventure.