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Day 10 - July 8
Branson, MO
Miles traveled: 11
Local Music:
SIX, a pretty good close harmony vocal group. Mostly doing acapella arrangements of oldies. Kinda trying to be what Rockapella was in the mid 90’s. I had wanted to go and see their show, but it doesn’t play on Sundays.
Didn’t do any traveling at all today, just explored Branson. None of what I saw was over-the-top exciting, but it was nice to have a day in which I didn’t spend hours in the car. So here’s what I did instead.
’57 Heaven is an odd sort of a car museum. Unlike the car museum we’ve got in Reno, in which you can see the entire history of the automobile, ’57 Heaven only has models from the year 1957. It’s got scores of different makes and models, but all from that year.
Went to the Roy Rogers/Dale Evans museum. Yes, they really did stuff and mount Trigger when he died and also Trigger Jr., Buttercup, and even Bullet the wonder dog. They claim, however, that Roy is just a wax figure.
The Titanic. They built a half scale replica of the front half of the ship, put in a collection of recovered artifacts from the ship, and built recreations of some of the rooms. It would have been much better if the movie had never happened. It seemed like there were as many references to the film as there were to history. It was also disappointing in that it did not allow pictures inside.
Hollywood wax museum. And the dinosaur museum. No big deal with either of them. At this point I was more of less just killing time before my dinner show.
Went to see two shows while in Branson, the first was “Amazing pets”, which was as you might have guessed, all about trained animals. They had a comedian/magician capuchin monkey and some trained birds and dogs. But the main attraction was the trained housecats. Jumping hoops, walking tight ropes, doing high dives. Unfortunately, no pictures of this allowed.
The second was Dolly Parton’s Dixieland Stampede. The show was basically the same as Medieval Times, but instead of a battle between opposing medieval knights, it’s a contest between the North and the South to “settle the rivalry once and for all”. I guess they never heard. There’s a series of trick-riding and or jousting style competitions between two teams, and goofy contests, like chicken chasing and toilet-seat horseshoes (this is the Ozarks after all) between audience volunteers all interspersed with variety shows sketches and musical numbers. It left me ready to leave Branson.
