Arrival Wednesday, July 22
273 Miles | 5.5 Hours
We travel across Arkansas, winding through the Ozarks a little too fast for Gypsy and the refrigerator door pops open for the first time in awhile, prompting Mari to use some serious Scotch tape to help hold it shut, because we're getting a little tired of cleaning up from tofu to spaghettis sauce from the floor of Gypsy.
We cruise in to Branson around 6pm and find the old town charming, with a city-run RV park down by the river, which is covered in a beautiful and mystic thick low mist under an otherwise sunny sky.
The office is closed so Mari books a reservation on their site but there’s no confirmed site assignments so we drop the Gypsy off in a drive thru spot close to the water and hope we aren’t in someone else’s space as we head towards the main strip for dinner as night starts to fall.
We added Branson on our itinerary to check in on the GoodNight Inn, a hotel that the fund invested in which was within a few weeks of being finished when the pandemic hit. We soon find out it has been sitting vacant with a fence around it to keep the homeless out ever since.
All around it the strip is in full swing with lots of glitz and neon, including a Dollywood stampede building that kicks off the festivities. From that point on the boulevard is a lively series of musical venues and go cart tracks, water parks and Ferris wheels, miniature golf courses and rollercoasters, with random attractions thrown in like a Ripley's Believe it or Not and a very large Titanic museum, replete with an oversize replica of the shop's prow pointing into traffic, and a giant upside down building that houses some other sort of family attraction.
It comes off as a cross between Vegas, Nashville and Gatlinburg, and the town is packed, with minimal social distancing going on.
The next morning I get a walking tour of the unfinished project at the Good Night Inn while Mari stays back to work at the park. I learn from the foreman that the project was stopped because the contractor was owed money; I make arrangements to talk to our partner to see what we can do to get the project completed.
We find some time to play mini golf, race go karts and taking walks by the lake at our campground surrounded by flocks of Canadian geese and multiple clutches of mama ducks with their babies, nesting on the beach.
There’s lots more to Branson than we had expected, including a giant amusement park just out of town that we would like to check out during the next time we visit.
Departure Friday, July 24
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