This winter in Iowa has been one of the longest ever. We have had more snow than we've had in over 20 years and a lot of the bad weather happened on the weekends, which just made for more cabin fever. When we were in the depths of it, I thought forward to Spring Breaking really wishing we could do something fun. A beach sounded fantastic, but it wasn't in the cards with our budget. Instead, we looked at Google Maps, drug southward from Iowa, and landed on Branson. Neither of us had ever been to Branson before, but we figured being 6 hours south, it had to be a little warmer than we would be in March and so we booked three nights in a hotel with a water park and called it a trip!

We ended up going with one of Russ's coworker's family who had kids in the 2-4 year range, and it turned out to be a lot of fun!

I prepared for the 6 hour drive with charged iPads, movies ready for the van DVD player, LOTS of snacks, and a little goodie bag for each boy. I put in simple items from the Dollar Tree like a note pad, sheets of stickers, multicolored pens, and some gum and candy. The ring pops and gum were a huge highlight.

We stayed at the Castle Rock Hotel and Water Park. We chose this place because it was affordable and it had a water park, which we knew would keep our boys busy.

The water park had two slides, two "baby pool" options, a deeper pool, and a lazy river. Some of the pools struggled to maintain warm temperatures some of the days we were there which was a little bit of a downer and on the last full day, two of the pools were closed down because of poop incidents (is that the appropriate way to say it?!). But still, the boys had a blast and I even tried out one of the slides.

I didn't get a picture of it, but you can check out what it looked like on the hotel website here. The hotel room was nice because it had two full beds plus a little cove with a bunk bed.  With a family of five sometimes hotel rooms can be tricky if there are just two beds and no one is in a crib anymore, but this one worked out great for us.

The first night we got into town, we checked into the hotel, swam a little, then hit up a Mexican place for dinner.

There are TONS of things to do in Branson! We really tried to stick to things that didn't break the bank. Everyone said go to the Dixie Stampede or Silver Dollar City, but each of those would have cost our family over $200 for the visit, so we decided to opt out and maybe go when the boys are a little older. We had heard fun things about Dick's 5 & 10. It's an old fashion 5 & 10 store with everything you can think of under the sun! We went there our first morning.

We swam again, then headed out for lunch.