Branson MO

WED June 2

With “chores” didn’t get to bed until 11:30 last night but it was nice and quiet with crickets and small birds and we slept in this morning.

A bit of shopping, relaxing and off to see what Branson has to offer. My impression is a lot of big names on marquees but not many of those names in town rather, Legends impersonators, and son’s of, as in Roy Rodgers & Dale Evans, son of, RR & DE, brothers of, Marty Haggard, lots of places to eat and buy t-shirts, a very ersatz and chintzy town, but fun if you know what you are getting yourself into, we had fun.

We ate well as we always do and we saw the REAL Yakov Smirnoff, “WHAT A COUNTRY!!” in a show and laughed and laughed. He told stories about people coming to this country and not being familiar with our customs and idioms such as what he said he thought when he saw a “Baby Changing Station” [guess it’s where you go if you don’t like the baby you have] and he wanted to buy a car and ask where he should go and was told to go to the car so he went to a lot full of cars, it was really a parking lot and saw a woman give a man a dollar bill and she said “blue Cadillac” and the man went and got her a blue Cadillac. Yakov’s punch line to those stories was “Bet you never thought of it that way but you will now.” He also talked a lot about love and laughter between two people and it is true that people who love each other laugh with each other.

When we left the show we saw lightening far off to the NW so when we got back to the campground I rolled up the awning and later at night there was wind, hard rain turning to hail, I slept through most of it. Wake up in the morning to find water on the shelf on the side where I sleep and so on the way south to Little Rock we stopped at a shop in Harrison AR and a tech put a lot of sealant on for free. [Will do permanently when I get back to AZ in SEP.] And it’s a good thing we had that taken care of because we were hit by 2 heavy rainstorms in the afternoon, had to get a 2-handed grip on the steering wheel and slow down on the Interstate.

We were going to stay at Naval Support Activity Mid-South, used to be NAS Memphis/Millington, campground and we had a very hard time finding it only to be very disappointed in the condition of the place when we got there so off to the Good Sam campground a block from Graceland, hook up and crash into bed.