God's grace the fog had lifted. I took over driving and Scott stretched out in the backseat. He slept for a couple hours until we were almost to Springfield. Hannah slept a little bit but not much. She kept our playlist going until she fell asleep and then it was all quiet, slow songs but I couldn't move passed them because I was afraid me pushing on her ipad would wake Hannah up.
Shortly, west of Springfield Scott took over driving and Hannah wrote her book review on Utopia. We had some interesting conversations about utopian societies and told Scott we couldn't have lunch until she was done. Finally, we stopped for gas where Hannah and I made mini ham sandwiches. On the road again we had a feast of ham/salami sandwiches, chex mix, and gummy lifesavers. We saw some birds and argued about whether they were red-tailed hawks or not.
I slept for a little while and we jammed on tunes going through Kansas City. We finally arrived. We could tell people were praying because we seemed to always miss the rain we were expecting. We arrived at the campground around 2:05 pm. As soon as we got in position, Hannah noticed we had wires hanging down, she crawled under the camper and after determining that nothing had been pulled out she zip-tied them up. 
We then set everything up and then tried to get organized for Buddy Ranger day. We had a lot of stuff: tarps, chairs, cot, gateraid, power bars, homeade granola bars and more. Plus it was supposed to rain so we needed extra clothes and boots.
Scott took a nap while Hannah and I headed to the marina to get ice. We saw a Meadowlark standing right on the road so we backed up to get a picture of it. 
We saw quite a few coots and took some pictures took the ice back to the coolers and headed for the beach. It wasn't quite what we expected after descending 250 steps. It wasn't real clean and the water was pretty lakey. We found this weird spiral thing in the water and discovered that they were fish eggs. 
We laid on the beach for a while and watched a goose who kept creeping closer. There were fish jumping out of the water and a lone mallard came and went. We were stretched out in the sun on the blanket when I heard a fish jump so I sat up to look and noticed the goose was stalking us. He had snuck out of the water and was on the beach. We decided we better head back and got up to leave and goosey went crazy. He started begging us not to leave him all in vain because we had 125 steps to climb back up. At the top of the steps we saw a bird swoop down and further into the woods. We quickly realized it was an owl and got our camera out! We were so excited. I have always wanted to see an owl in the wild but never had. We took turns taking pictures of it trying to get good angles. It was so much fun. After we got back in the truck we pulled out our ipads to check Waite's Field Guide and figured out it was a Barred Owl. AWESOME!!
Hannah's grandparents, the Boudreaus, pulled up to the campground next to us just as we were starting our feast of burgers and beans. We had petite baby carrots and baby cucumbers, too. We went to bed early knowing we were having to get up early. Hannah and I planned to leave by 4:30 so we could see the team off on their 9 mile ruck.
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