This weekend, our youngest son participated in a robotics competition in Camdenton, Missouri, which is about an hour and a half away from Nogglestead. Instead of getting up at a very early hour to have him at the competition at 7:15 am, we took lodging in Osage Beach, Missouri, for the weekend. Osage Beach is one of the communities on Lake of the Ozarks, another one of the large dam-created lakes in Missouri that filled in valleys and made lots of lakefront property. However, December is not the peak tourism season for Osage Beach, so we essentially had the place to ourselves.
While the lad did his robotics thing, we did our normal visiting-a-new-place thing: look for book stores.
The area does not abound with book stores. The only we could find within thirty miles was a Publishers’ Warehouse at the outlet mall. Which we visited, and I was pleased to discover they had a $1 book cart (just like Hooked on Books, but with newer books).
I got a couple.
I got:
- Seaworthy, another book about being on the ocean by Linda Greenlaw. I’ve been picking them up since I read The Lobster Chronicles, but I haven’t read another. I should rectify this soon, since I probably have the whole set.
- Saint Odd, the last (?) of the Odd Thomas novels. I have not read the one that precedes it (Deeply Odd), but I am current to Odd Apocalypse. I bought this one since I’ll need it after I get that book and read it, so why not save? Although I did pay more than a dollar for this book.
- Contemporary Mosaics, what I thought to be a modern art book collection about mosaics, but as I started to browse
- Painted Treasures, which I thought was a book about painted objects, I discovered this book is a collection of how-to projects for how you can recreate the painted objects. The book was published by the parent company of Writers Digest which has a number of art books in its stable, but this is the first painting project book I’ve looked at. So perhaps the mosaics book is about making mosaics as well.
We also got a couple of gifts, and others in the family got fully priced mark down books, so I cannot tell you how much I spent. Maybe ten dollars.
The funny thing was that I did not want to spend a lot of time driving in the darkness, but my trip to Osage Beach was in the darkness Friday night, and we left early this morning from Osage Beach so we could see my beautiful wife sing in a Christmas Cantata at 8am this morning, so what I really did was just split the driving in the darkness by twenty-four hours. Which is okay; I’d never been to Osage Beach before, and it became an adventure with a little book shopping attached.
