With a one week road trip and a staunch refusal to kowtow to the pressures of “credit whoring” (the act of going to as many amusement parks as possible solely to ride coasters), spending a full day in and around Kansas City seemed a smart move. Alone, the Kansas City, MO is the highest populated city in Missouri, but in tandem with its suburbs in Kansas, we felt that there as plenty to do in order to justify our time around there.
Weather was a primary concern during this trip, and led to a lot of “compression” with the schedule and virtually empty days elsewhere. This day was one of those situations – bad-looking weather was coming to Missouri for the end of the week. It made good sense to change what was originally a sort of “drive and rest” day to being stacked with activity.
The Ozark city of Branson may have the reputation to some of being Cracker Barrel blown up into a resort town. There’s abject truth to that. However, that sort of dismissive tone doesn’t do much to really express what Branson is like or what it is becoming. Branson is a very multi-faceted vacation destination that is both helped and hindered by geography, population movement, and its own reputation. Silver Dollar City might be one of the town’s biggest and primary draws, but it isn’t the only one.
Branson’s tourist zone is primarily set along MO-76, a 2 lane thoroughfare which tendrils running to all sorts of other resorts and attractions. Aside from Silver Dollar City, people also come to play in Table Top Lake, a reservoir created by the damming of the White Lock River. There are mountains and some hiking opportunities both near to the tourist drag at Henning Conservation Area and into the areas surrounding Table Top. Unlike Pigeon Forge though, a large national park is not the major draw.
Silver Dollar City was supposed to be a day trip that we wound up buying a season pass for. Because of the way it breaks up the trip, I’ve separated it out to talk about it specifically rather than try to squash it into a day-by-day narrative.
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Most of the post-Disney and Six Flags Over Texas theme parks follow similar rules about design. They are purpose-built in the suburbs, away from public transport. They utilize hubs, loops, and anchors for guest flow. They may no longer follow their original plan, but they all had one, and their infrastructure definitely shows aspects of that. The majority of them feature large, monumental entrances. Silver Dollar City is absolutely nothing like these parks.
11 years and change since I had last been in the city of St. Louis, much had changed. This much was readily apparent as we wandered from our hotel room Sunday morning and onto the streets for some urban walking and photo taking. Gentrification has begun to set up here in the city’s core in much the same way that it seems to be across the Midwest. Lots of new businesses offering coffee and outdoor dining sit under popcorn lights strung overhead. Signs about “aggressive panhandling” are quite obvious and impossible to miss. Has St. Louis lost part of itself? Is urban decay somehow more real? Continue reading
This past winter, we acquired a new vehicle. Brand new. So new that it fueled our interest in doing a big road trip for this summer. We never really done one of those before from the house, so it seemed to be an appealing idea. There were many parks which interested both of us in the center of the US that we’d not been to, mostly in the state of Missouri. Having a car and taking an extended road trip was a perfect way to go to most of them. This then is going to be a pretty long travelogue with a lot of parts and lots of words. Hopefully one can gain something from it other than me remembering half the stuff we did. Continue reading
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