Santa made a special visit to Branson over the weekend so Mimi and Papa could get their Christmas on with Abby and the big winner from Christmas Haul #1 is the Razor scooter. We found this great unused parking lot in Branson, but she crashed after just a few minutes and wanted to rest for awhile. When we got back to Little Rock she made me take her to a “tennis course” because that was the smoothest place she could think of to ride on.

Mimi and Papa’s big hit was a new huge TV.

We spent most of the time watching Abby open her presents.

Abby doesn’t like to limit herself to just opening her gifts. She likes to get in on others’ opening their stuff.

We also went to the Christmas extravaganza at the Dixie Stampede, but you’re not allowed to take pictures inside and the photos I tried to sneak turned out too blurry and weird.

A couple weekends ago we loaded up for a trip to Branson to see Mimi, Papa and Meemaw. Abby has for some reason took a liking to miniature golf so we took the unprecedented step of visiting two mini golf establishments in a single day. First up was a pirate-themed course complete with pirate ship. Abby and I jumped up on the ship’s afterdeck to take a turn at the wheel. I yelled “Avast!” a couple of times.

When we finished the round they gave me this cool hat and eye patch.

After dinner that evening we walked across the street to a mini golf course with a Land That Time Forgot kinda theme. A raging plastic triceratops caught Abby and me off guard. BTW it turns out the triceratops might not have been what we all think it was.

The place had a big fake volcano that belched flames about every 15 minutes. I wanted to get a photo of Abby and Gina with the spewing volcano in the background, but every time the thing went off Abby ran away from it and all the pictures came out like this one with Gina waving frantically for Abby to come back. Even after seeing it do its thing about 50 times, Abby still wasn’t convinced that lava wasn’t going to come down and engulf her.

I even worked in a waterfall shot.

We stormed Branson a couple of weekends ago to spend time with Mimi and Pawpaw. Mimi got us another sweet suite at the resort where she works.

Last summer I stopped by the place that’s home to the World’s Largest Banjo, dubbed “Branson’s Eiffel Tower,” just to take a photo of it. This time we hit the place to take advantage of the fun-packed attractions on the other side of the colossal instrument.

The big draw at the Grand Country Square is 3-D Blacklight Mini-Golf. For an additional $3 you get the 3-D glasses to get the full experience. Although I immediately observed that if one is playing mini-golf on a real-live mini-golf course, one is experiencing actual 3-D. No extra enhancement needed.

This is possibly the greatest photo I’ve ever taken. Click on the picture to see the big version. You won’t be disappointed.

The 3-D mini-golf caused a bit of sensory overload for Abby. She enjoyed the mini-bowling much better.

We went to Branson to visit Abby’s Mimi and Papa about a month ago. We’ve been to Branson many times because Gina’s parents live there, but we hardly ever do any Bransony type stuff. We made a mini-vacation out of this trip so we thought it would be appropriate to bite the Branson fruit and let the nectar run down our faces. Gina’s mom works at a big resort and she got us a very nice suite to stay in. The place has several swimming pools so Abby was pretty happy about that. A huge draw in Branson is the World’s Largest Banjo. As you can see in the picture the neck goes all the way out the window.

Branson is apparently home to half the world’s miniature-golf courses. We picked out the one with a South American expedition theme. Think Indiana Jones or Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Unfortunately, it was about 300 degrees with 85 percent humidity even though it was nearly dark when we got there. We narrowly averted heat prostration, but it did add to the jungle vibe.

We also checked out a pretty neat butterfly emporium filled with tame butterflies.

Fun with signs.

Papa and Abby.

The whole gang minus me.

Of course we had to go to Silver Dollar City. Abby spent a lot of time asking when we were going to eat cotton candy, so we eventually got a huge bucket of the stuff.

The river rafting ride soaked all of us and terrified Abby. I shot this through one of the plastic bags they sell for 50 cents so passengers can protect their cameras and other water-soluble items.

Abby’s favorite place was the giant cage filled with these foam balls. All kinds of weird Rube Goldberg contraptions ferried the balls to the top of the three-story cage where they then got distributed to big containers scattered around. The containers sat near big air guns you used to shoot the balls across the cage or at other people. The whole thing was laid out so that it was nearly impossible to hit others with the air guns. A marvel of engineering. Abby really enjoyed shoving the balls into the big vacuum tubes on the ground level.

Abby wanted to do some less scary rides so we went to the kiddie-ride section, where she refused to ride anything because she thought they would be too scary. Then we went to another section that had baby rides. And I mean actual babies rode these rides alone and had a ball. Not Abby. She screamed bloody murder the entire time on the frog ride, even though Gina was holding on to her. Look at the terror on her face.