For years, Betty & I have been reading ads in the Winnipeg Free Press for bus tours to Branson, Missouri, which bills itself as the “Live Music Entertainment Capitol of the World”. No hyperbole here…LOL. Since this southwestern Missouri city was more-or-less on our route home from Memphis, we thought we’d make it the 4th and last stop on our musical ride.
Most of our travel time was through the cotton fields of Arkansas and the Ozark Mountains that surround Branson. At $24./night for a full service campsite, we booked into site 124 at nearby Table Rock State Park, with the intent of cleaning
and preparing our motorhome for a brief storage period back in Manitoba. Being at Branson for 4 days, we thought we’d also check out a few of the many attractions listed, and maybe catch one of those live shows.
Truth be told, we found Branson to be a major disappointment, although maybe we didn’t give it a full chance to impress. It turned out that Elvis Presley himself was not at Presley’s Jubilee. Apparently he had already left the building! While Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and many other music legends were also being promoted, it appeared that none of them were there in person! What a let down!! LOL
The Branson entertainment guide had a picture of Michael Jackson on the cover, and you could get up close and personal with him, Taylor Swift, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, and others – or at least wax images of them – at the Hollywood Wax Museum Entertainment Center: “One of the biggest attractions in Branson”. Everywhere we looked we saw imitations of this, tributes to that, copies of something else, including, for some reason, a replica of the Titanic hitting an iceberg on Route 76, their main drag. What’s that about? We didn’t check it out…
It may very well be that Betty & I are too harsh on Branson. It rained quite a bit during our visit, and we were more focused on the road home, rather than the musical ride. Will we ever go back to the “Live Music Entertainment Capitol of the World”? Maybe, or maybe we’ll just go to an imitation of Branson next year, in a place out west called Las Vegas, Nevada. LOL.
Cheers!
