Branson Missouri Vacation Recap Day 1

A couple of weeks ago the Man Child and I took the girls on a fun summer vacation to Branson, Missouri. If you aren't local(ish) to me, then you probably have no idea what I am talking about. 

Branson is a town in Missouri located in the Ozark Mountains. But it is anything but a sleepy little mountain town. In Branson you can do it all from visit amusement parks, see live shows, eat ridiculous amounts of food and do a ton of shopping. 

The girls had never been to Branson and it had been a few years since the hubby and I visited, so it was a fun trip for all! And we had a few tricks up our sleeves for them. :)

When we arrived in Branson, I knew that we could not check into our Hotel until we were done for the day, so we decided to do some sight seeing. 

When you first pull into Branson on the strip, there is something to see from every direction. I did not manage to get a picture of the strip, but here is a picture I borrowed from www.getbranson.com.

 The first thing we did with the girls is take them to visit the Titanic Museum. You can find information on the Museum here.

There is no photography allowed inside the museum. Which was kind of sad, because there was sooo much to see! We did get a shot of the outside before we ran in.

 Once inside we were given cards with information on actual passengers from the trip. This made the tip even more interactive and fun for the kids because they were looking everywhere for themselves.  At the end we found out that both of the girls passengers had survived the crash. Me and Justin's passengers weren't as lucky. ;) We, of course, had to purchase copies of the pictures that the museum staff took of us. I could not find any coupons online for the museum, but I was able to find a coupon for 10% merchandise in gift shop. The coupon was in one of the visitor guide/Branson map brochures.

It was a lot of fun, and we got to see all sorts of neat stuff. If you have a kid that is Titanic obsessed, this is a must do.

After we left the museum we went do went the road to the Hollywood Wax Museum. Here is the outside of the building.

Once inside they take pictures of your family with a giant King Kong Statue. I got a coupon off of the website for a free 8x10 copy of one of the photos.

Here is the one we picked.

I got a ton of pictures inside the museum. You can pose with all the statues, and we posed with just about all of them. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the museum.

After we left the museum we ate way too much food at Olive Garden and then moved on to our hotel.

Here's the deal, the girls knew NOTHING about the hotel we had chosen. And it had been killing me for about 2 months, because I knew they were going to lose their minds. 

While we were driving thru town there was a lot of teasing going on in the car. We told the girls the hotel didn't have a pool, then we admitted they had a pool... but we pulled up next to a hotel with an empty pool... and told the girls that was our hotel and they forgot to fill the pool up.

Little did they know at the time, we booked a hotel with an indoor water park. When we did finally arrive at the hotel Rae read the sign out loud and they both started freaking out. We stayed two nights at Castle Rock Hotel.  Inside the water park they had two water slides, a lazy river, a kiddie pool, an indoor pool and two outdoor pools.

Here's a picture from their website.

 

We spent the first night in the pools and on the water slides for about 2 1/2 hours before going back to the room and falling into bed face first. I can't even count the number of times the girls thanked us for taking them on vacation. 

That's all for now. I'll get information up about days 2 and 3 in the next few days. :)