Day 1, Monday September 19, 2016: Montauk State Park

Today we started our week-long adventure to the Motauk State Park. Montauk is one of several trout parks in Missouri. We visited Montauk once before and stayed one night in one of their cabins. We did no fishing, but swore we would be back. This week we are back. We will be staying four nights in one of their two bedroom cabins with full kitchen and fireplace. While the temperature is supposed to be in the mid-80s this week, the fireplace will add a charm to the cabin.

It is roughly 150 miles from our place to the park. We left today around noon. The trip down I-44 was uneventful. We got of the Interstate at Rolla and drove the last 50 miles on State and County highways to the park. We stopped once in Cuba, MO and picked up some BBQ from our favorite BBQ place (Missouri Hickory). We met the owner. T told him that we always stopped anytime we passed by. He was very proud. We also stopped in Rolla to pick up some items at the grocery. We have plenty of food for the week.

We got to the park around 3:30pm. Since 3:00pm was check-in time, we immediately went to the lodge and got our cabin keys. We were put in C28. It is a quadruplet cabin and we had one of the two second floor “cabins”. Nice accommodation. While we had previously purchased our MO fishing licenses, we still need to purchase a daily trout tag. The guy at the lodge said they would start selling the next day’s tags at 6:15pm each day at the lodge.

After getting moved in, we relaxed for a bit and at some of the BBQ we picked up in Cuba. We then drove around the park, making our plans for the next day.  It was about 6:00pm when we headed back to the lodge. We decided we probably needed to check our gear just in case we forgot something. T had already realized she did not bring any footwear appropriate for wading in the fast moving streams. It was a good thing we checked because we discovered we did not bring any of our flies. Therefore, in addition to our trout tags, we also bought T a pair of shoes and five pairs of flies.
We retired to the room, had a quick dinner of frozen mozzarella balls and went to bed early.