More Branson sightseeing

Branson, MO – June 18-20. 2012

After the Butterfly Museum, we ate lunch at a great Mexican (NOT Tex-Mex) restaurant. I had shrimp enchiladas! Yummy.

Then we visited the old downtown Branson Museum & walked around window shopping. In a flag store, Jeff purchased a Viet Nam ball cap. Branson is extremely responsive & respectful of Viet Nam vets, so Jeff finally feels comfortable showing his having served there. It’s taken decades for these veterans to receive much of a welcome or thank you from society. Then we grabbed an air conditioned ride on the free trolley (to cool off) to see if we’d missed anything in the area. We noticed a train station which has scenic rides that’s on our bucket list to take.

Then we headed toward home & stopped at the Veterans Museum. This statue is in front of the building. Before the March 2012 tornado, there was an actual P-51 Mustang plane sitting on top of that brick wall on the left of this photo.

The museum has a room for WWI, WWII, Korean War, Viet Nam, & Desert Storm. Each room has walls filled with all the names of military personnel killed during that action. This is the ONLY place in the world where all these names are displayed. Inside the building is this HUGE sculpture of marching infantry soldiers using the actual faces of WWII combat soldiers — one from each of our 50 states.

The next day we visited the new Visitor’s Center at Table Rock Dam. We watched a very informative movie about the need for & actual building of the dam. There are so many dams on the White River in SW Missouri & NW Arkansas that most of it is considered one lake or another. These Ozark mountains caused some ferocious floods for decades before the dams were built.

My very first sailboat cruise was on Table Rock back in 1970.

We continued south, then east from Table Rock Dam to this scene of the back side of the dam.

These are some of the interesting scenes along our travels of the area.

Well, playtime was over & we had to start another 4-day string of serving breakfast & supper at the Whistle Stop Café. Considering this end of June in Branson will be having upper 90° (if not full-fledged triple digit) weather with thick humidity, we may just lay low in our A/C next week (enjoying our new-to-us VCR) instead of playing tourists. And then it’s 4th of July week, so we’re hoping for fewer crowds the week after the 4th to continue exploring the area.