Bradley Robertson

For my 29th birthday I had decided earlier in the summer that I wanted to go to a theme park to celebrate. Originally I was going to go to Worlds of Fun. As the summer progressed and I started to get my fill of that park I decided it would be more fun to go to a new park. At that time I decided I wanted to make the trip up to Chicago and go to Six Flags Great America. After talking to a few folks on Coaster Community I decided it would be best to put off that trip until September. SFGAm has been busy all August, and most people report the park is ill-equipped to handle large crowds. Instead, I moved my Branson trip up a few weeks and I ended up going to Silver Dollar City on my birthday.

Valerie and I got in to Branson around 10 PM on the 21st. I had a hard time winding down, so I went to bed a little later than I had planned. I also woke up later than I had planned to on Friday as a result. We left the hotel around 11 AM, but we didn’t make it to the front gates until around Noon. Unfortunately the GPS program on my phone seemed to think Silver Dollar City was on the complete other side of Branson. Thankfully, GPS works with Google Maps on my phone and I was able to get us to the park using that.

Like most theme parks Silver Dollar City has an option for “preferred parking” that you pay extra for. However, unlike most theme parks they have free parking and trams that will take you to the front entrance. We opted for the free parking and the wait for the tram was only about 5 minutes. Once we got to the front gate I stopped to take a few pictures before heading on in to the park.

Once inside the park we went to the right through Midtown and down Valley Road. We stopped to see if the blacksmith was working on anything but it appeared he was between projects and was cleaning up. Down the road a little at Hazel’s Glass we watched a little bit of a glass blowing demonstration. The glass blower was younger than I have normally seen at the park, and he didn't seem all that outgoing. I’m not sure if it was his attitude, or lack of interaction with the crowd, but this wasn’t as neat as I remembered it being as a child.

We hit up Thunderation since it was next to the glass shop and this became my 60th coaster. I hadn’t really read much about it so I didn’t realize how much it uses the terrain. The coaster is built on the side of a hill so once you leave the station you immediately pick up speed as you head down the hill. It was a fun coaster even if it did have a few things I found odd. Since it is built on a hill the chain lift part of the ride occurs at the end. There are a few small drops afterwards but the bulk of the ride experience is over once you hit the lift hill. The other thing I found unique was that every other car faced backwards. I’m sure there are other Arrow Mine Trains that are setup this way, but this was the first time I have encountered it.

After riding Thunderation we continued down Valley Road to where the Culinary Craft School is being constructed. The outside looks completely down, and according to MidwestInfoGuide they are putting the finishing touches on the interior and should be ready to open on 9/11/08. We moved on to The Grand Exposition area of the park and made our way to the Grand Exposition Coaster. I was a little disappointed at first because it appeared that the coaster was not open. However, while I was standing there the employees did some test runs. After the test-runs were done the employees were looking over logs but still hadn’t opened up the line. I didn’t feel like waiting that much longer so I decided to ask when they expected to open the ride for the day, and lo and behold he said, “Now.”