Back to Branson

As I am going to have to write and post our yearly Christmas update soon, I really have to get this Branson vacation finished.  No more excuses!

So, we arrived in Branson late Sunday afternoon.  Jeremy actually traveled very well…except for the last 20 minutes.  He was hungry and tired of being in his car seat, so he commenced with screaming.  Elijah tried screaming back at him to get him to stop, and even Charlotte, who is usually quite patient, was asking him to stop it. 

At least, it was only 20 minutes!

We arrived at Still Waters Resort and got checked in.  As it was late in the season, the place was nearly empty, but it was quite beautiful there.  Our two-bedroom condo overlooked Table Rock Lake, and the leaves were beautifully colored.  We were pretty pleased with our vacation accommodations!

For some reason, I took zero pictures of our condo or of our view, save this one of Jeremy being naughty.  He was after the power cords that were under this side table.

Jeff’s parents were joining us here from Tennessee and arrived shortly after we did.  Their condo was right above ours, which was nice and convenient!  We ate supper at the Bayside Market, a small shop and carry-out restaurant right on site at the resort.  Elijah wanted pizza, so that’s what we had for supper!

While Jeff’s parents babysat Jeremy, the rest of us spent the evening attending the first of two shows that we had booked in Branson, the Kirby Van Burch Magic Show.  This theater was WAY off the beaten path, and I think that it must have originally housed some sort of Arabian Adventure show, as we entered the theater underneath a spire straight out of Aladdin.  The paint was peeling, the carpet was threadbare, and the whole thing looked kind of shabby.

“What are we doing here?”  Jeff and I asked each other.

We took our seats shortly before the show started and were treated to an older gentlemen who tried to convince us that the Sunday night show was the smallest of the week (the seats were maybe one-fourth filled) and then gave us a hard sell on Kirby Van Burch memorabilia.  “This stuff is going for at least $70 on eBay right now,”  he informed us with a straight face.  “It’s an amazing bargain at $25!”

This probably wasn’t the best thing to be saying with an audience containing Jeff and his iPhone (the only KVB thing on eBay at the time was a secret to a magic trick being auctioned for thousands of dollars), and we managed to resist the limited edition stuffed tiger and signed photograph.

However, in spite of the rundown theater and snake-oil salesman who kicked things off, the show itself was really quite entertaining.  Kirby Van Burch uses lions and tigers in his show, and they are beautiful, magnificent animals.  In fact, he’s probably operating out of this particular theater because the cost of keeping the cats forces him to do so.  Kirby himself is a pretty small man with a very strange, nasally voice, but he is a good showman, and he has some very cool tricks!

And, fortunately, our children just aren’t as jaded as we are!  They enjoyed the show very, very much.  And, honestly, Jeff and I did, as well.  We saw David Copperfield perform at a casino hotel in Mississippi some years back, and Kirby Van Burch’s show was probably just as good as Copperfield’s.

Of course, photos during the show were not allowed, so I don’t have much interesting to look at for this night.

And that is the end of our first day in Branson.  Next time: a slightly more educational pursuit!