Wow, outstanding! I'm thinking it's going to be pretty exciting just to hear your review afterwards.
We just returned a couple days ago. Not sure when I'll have time to write up a full review, so this might be my only review of it. There were a number of things that weren't like we expected, but it was fun and we'll probably do it again sometime.
We had a Sunday to Sunday exchange, and I was out of town through our check-in date (getting home close to midnight on Sunday), so we drove to OK on Monday. We had called in advance to make sure what time we had to be there. They said they were open 8am to 5pm and it took an hour to check in, so we shot for arriving before 4pm. We got there a little after 3pm, but they said it was too late in the day to get captain training and that we would have had to have arrived before 3pm. We could sleep on the boat, but couldn't go out until the next day.
The approximately one hour captain training was good, and we felt comfortable doing everything we were taught. You have to know how to start the boat, start and stop the generator, use the radio, beach and tie up the boat, etc.
It was fairly easy to drive, but because of the length it's very slow to respond. When you turn the wheel, it's literally 10-15 seconds before the boat starts turning. At first, you do a lot of weaving back and forth. Also, the top speed on the boat is about 5-6 MPH. A GPS is also helpful, and I regularly used the one on my phone.
You think of a 52 foot boat, and you think it's huge. Until you get in it. Part of that 52 feet is the front and back deck. The living room and kitchen is fairly spacious (similar to a small timeshare), but calling it "3 bedroom" is a bit of a misnomer. One "bedroom" is two bunks tucked in off of the hall at the back of the boat. No door or room. Just two bunks off the hall. The other two bedrooms are basically about 18" wider than the queen size bed each one contained. The bed was wedged in, touching the wall on three sides, with about 18" of floor space on the side by the door. Tiny doesn't describe it. The bunks looked fairly comfortable (4" memory foam on plywood), but our bed was way firmer than we like. Both of our backs hurt the whole trip. The pillows had annoying plastic covers on them, under the pillow cases.
The nearest town (with a Walmart) is about 30 minutes away. We made one Walmart trip.
The water on the boat (all sinks, shower, etc.) is all filtered (at least I think it was filtered) lake water. We brought bottled water to use for drinking, cooking, brushing teeth, etc. 11 gallons lasted us the week.
When you want to come or go in the boat, they have to pull the houseboat out of or into the marina, so you have to do it on their schedule. They're only open from 8am to 5pm, so you're limited to that. Also, you're not allowed to drive the boat at night, so if you're out you have to tie up somewhere.
When you're in your boat dock at the marina, you're hooked up to electric. When you go out, you have to run the generator to have electricity. It uses about 1-2 gallons of gas per hour, and they're pretty proud of their gas ($3.89/gallon when we were there, about double what it was at the gas stations nearby). They don't recommend running the generators overnight. My wife and kids all sleep with fans, so they were hesitant to stay out. We were also concerned about running up a huge gas bill by using the generator. We finally did stay out overnight about half-way through the trip, and we liked it so much better that we stayed out for the rest of the trip. We basically only ran the generator for about an hour at breakfast, lunch and dinner time. We ended up spending about $130 on gas. We were afraid it was going to be more.
Wi-Fi was available in the marina, but it was spotty and went down several times. Cell coverage was spotty as well in the marina, but was better out on the lake.
No dishwasher (we're kind of spoiled by that), so it seemed like we spent an inordinate amount of time cooking and washing dishes.
We fished and swam a lot. Not much luck fishing (5 small fish all week). The kids loved the slide from the upper deck.
We'll probably go again. If we do, we'll bring about half as much stuff. The first time you go, you never really know what to expect, so you bring a lot of stuff you don't need. We'll go at the right times, and we'll head out and won't return until it's time to check out, probably making a big circle around the nearby portions of the lake (you have to stay within a specified area) staying somewhere different each night. We'll bring some of our own pillows. We'll bring some fish with us, so we can still eat fish even if our luck isn't that great.
At checkout, you have to clean all the dishes, empty the trash, strip the beds, and have all of your stuff unloaded before you can check out, and they take about an hour to check out. Check-out time is 9am. (We went ahead and checked out Saturday afternoon so we could sleep in our own beds that night and be at our church on Sunday.) At checkout, they will inspect the boat, checking EVERYTHING and if anything is damaged or missing, they'll charge you for it. The only thing we were charged for was a $6 plastic bucket (probably $1 at Walmart) which had a couple cracks at the top.
