Ah, gentle reader, you are correct. It was quiet around here for a couple of days. You might have panicked, if you even visited Monday through Wednesday at all, thinking that I, like Wirecutter or Animal, had hung it up or drastically reduced the output. Oh, but no such luck for those relying on the Chinese Large Language Models training themselves up on the inanity that this site has provided over the last twenty-three (almost) years–if your legal brief prefixes with the clause “As the Philosopher says” while quoting a Richard Marx song, it’s as good as a watermark–I have not quit. But I did take a little trip down to Branson.
But, Brian J.! you exclaim. Didn’t you just take a trip to Florida? I did! That, as I mentioned, was a “marketing package” from a timeshare company which we’d booked early in 2024 and had to use by January 2026, so we had to use it.
This trip, though, was one of my beautiful wife’s “annual retreats” where she books a couple days in a resort in Branson in the off-season and uses the quiet (which means no boys to distract her) to work on self-improvement or focus on her Web sites, conference talks, or whatnot. As my contracts are currently in abeyance for the holidays (hopefully are in abeyance and not have ended), she invited me along. So I went.
We were booked in a one bedroom unit in (The) Falls Village just south of Branson’s main area. I put (The) in parentheses because the resort name appears both with and without the article throughout the property. It’s an older property, decently kept up (subject to change since another bigger, snazzier timeshare company has bought it and seems to be focusing its attention on the snazzier properties owned by the previous company). It has an indoor pool and hot tub, a small fitness center, and is walkable to some places (a cat cafe, a diner that serves live country music with its breakfasts).
However, we spent most of the time in the unit (as planned). For starters, one of her current engagements required a lot of her attention (four hours a day), so it was almost just working remotely from remoter in her case. Secondly, Branson is in the off-season: After the Christmas shows close right after the first of the year, the shows go into remission until sometime in March or April, when travelers (not the Roma sort) start making their journeys again and there’s tourist revenue to earn. Some of the indoor attractions are still open, maybe catering to the occasional field trips and safe from the weather, but we’ve been to the most interesting of them. And, finally, we were not eating out at the restaurants that did not also close because we are doing the Whole 30 diet yet (now on day 87, it seems, but just day nine).
So she worked, and I spent most of three days on the unit’s sofa, reading books (unlike the trip to Florida, where I read magazines to discard). So I got a good head start on the Winter Reading Challenge (although a Facebook memory from last year indicates I was through with six books by this time last year, whereas I am only through three and several fractions).
We did take two walks along Table Rock Lake in the state park on a couple of days, and I did hit the fitness center (what to do with only dumbells up to 50 pounds? Reverse pyramids, my boy, reverse pyramids.) in between, but mostly reading.
I did kind of feel bad because all I was doing was relaxing, and she had to work. She, on the other hand, worried I was not having fun because she was working. We reached an uneasy truce of sorts where we assured each other it was all right, but hoped it was so.
So, a couple notes about Branson in the off season:
- The Walmart and the grocery were on lean mixtures. Without the tourists visiting, they had thinner stock than we expected, especially in meat. Normally, we go to the grocery for groceries and the Walmart for sundries, but the thin meat selection sent us to the Walmart (next door) for meat, and we discovered the Walmart is an old-style Walmart with a very thin grocery section. But we got provisions.
- Without tourists, the locals were about the only people about. And the locals are about what you would expect from small towns in Missouri but leavened with some foreigners, perhaps guest workers idling until the season resumes or fortunate guest workers who have year-round employment at the hotels and resorts which are still open.
- The resort was really quiet. The building we were in has at least 18 units (some are connectible units which are often booked together, but 18 individual rooms are available) on each floor and three floors. To my Ennglish major math, that’s 54 units total. The first night we were there, only three cars were parked by it (by the night before we left, it was up to six or seven cars, but still not very many people). Additionally, the room was very quiet. Nogglestead generally has some background noise–we’re running laundry all day, the dishwasher is going, the downstairs fridge and freezer run their compressors, and the upstairs refrigerator, which has long had a rattling compressor fan, has recently developed more of a rattle and runs very frequently, so the coils are likely dirty and/or frozen (ask me about it in a couple of days, when I will have fixed it or incapacitated our main refrigerator).
Although we did some laundry, the laundry was in the vestibule between our unit and the “studio” unit which could connect to ours to make a two bedroom unit. We ran the dishwasher after every meal (prepared in-room), and the utility closet provided an intermittent rattle, but for the most part, the room was silent. We did not bring a bluetooth speaker, and the television did not offer its speakers via bluetooth and offered no music channels, so we could not play music. Just…. A lot of silence.
The weather was unseasonably warm–highs in the upper 60s and low 70s–so it did not feel like winter at all. It was very odd.
At any rate, it was a nice trip; definitely less stressful than flying (and having to get up at 3am to drive an hour to fly). A working washer and dryer (and no complaining offspring) made for a better trip than this summer (and I didn’t try to work on a hotspot, although it was probably better in Branson proper–my wife did it).
I was eager to come back home, though, and as I mentioned, this year’s theme is Get away from the damned desk. So far, so good.
