With graduate school starting up this week, my friend Amanda and I decided we needed to get away for a bit.

Her family has an awesome lake house at the Lake of the Ozarks and we took off Friday after school to have a “ladycation” that was long overdue.

Let me just say that Mid-Missouri has some things I’ve never seen before…such as:

CAMO MOUNTAIN DEW!

That’s pretty intense, no?

Don’t worry-we didn’t buy any…

We stopped for supplies and made our way to the lake. We watched Magic Mike (I fell asleep…) on two couches pushed together. We like to call it “mega couch” and it is the best thing EVER! I highly recommend you try this. And think of us of course.

I woke up Saturday morning at 5:18 (that is actually sleeping in!) and read for a few hours until Amanda woke up.

We made some lunch:

Clearly we forgot some things at the store…

That’s a lot of protein…so that would be half a chicken burger and a chicken sausage with mustard and some of our canned zucchini relish.

It was so beautiful that we laid on the dock and read for a while. I read Gone Girl and Wild and am starting Pride and Prejudice since I want to pretend I am more educated or something…

Then we did some recon work to find a place to hang out for the evening. We’d been to a “marina” before but couldn’t remember where it was…after about an hour of driving around the deserted lake we found it! Low and behold-they would be open that evening!

We watched some more movies and got ready for dinner.

The best part of this bar? You could have ice cream! And play cards! And sing karaoke! I’m pretty sure all the locals know us now…

Except we went by Candy and Dandy until they found out who Amanda’s family was…no big deal.

Wanna know how I know everyone around that lake knows us?? Because one stopped by the house on Sunday to invite us to a potluck…oh Amanda-how do we draw such a crowd?!

We were sad to pack up but after we thought we would be kidnapped by strangers (or really friends now…) on the lake we quickly decided it was time to go home. We managed to break the faucet in the kitchen so we did the dishes the old fashioned way. In the bathroom sink.

That’s how all the cool kids do it, right?

It was a great weekend and I was glad to get away and spend some time with Amanda. We wore lots of sweat pants, and chatted, and read, and dissertated a bit. It was pretty magical!

What have YOU done lately to get away and relax?