Silver Dollar City

Silver Dollar City is the bigger of the two Branson parks.

Almost immediately it reminded me of Dollywood in Tennessee with plenty of trees and lots of theming such as this water powered clock. If the similarity is strong its because the same people own both parks.

Checker games in abundance, a nice touch, I just wonder how many pieces they lose each day.

It's not the park asylum, it's a shop that sells nuts.

Our morning was to begin with an ERS on Powder Keg, the park's launch coaster.

It's themed around a scientist's experiments with gunpowder. The launch is based on the explosion from one such test.

The launch was quite punchy but not overly so. The ride was retro-fitted onto the parks water splash ride, making it fairly unique.

and the rest of the track not too bad either. Not the standout ride I thought it would be but good all the same.

Heading back into the park, western theming in abundance, but then we are in the right part of the world for that :D

The biggest roller coaster in the park is Wildfire, a large custom built monster.

One cool thing about the location of this ride is that the queues to it are all near the highest point of the ride rather than the lowest. This gives you a unique perspective literally.


The cobra roll element. You don't get this high usually.

The large loop in the centre of the ride, rather than the beginning. The ride was a lot of fun and we had a good couple of goes on it. It was amusing seeing one of the club liking it so much that he'd jump straight back on if there was a spare seat on the train he'd just left. Naughty but funny!

A good sign of a park taking its theming seriously as they do here is when they spend money on things nowhere near rides or where the public can get to. The sort of thing you might overlook if you weren't paying attention.

A rolling pin shop for those wives whose husbands never get home on time. From the top you can also see that they also lathe baseball bats for those men who need to defend themselves from wives with rolling pins.


Thunderation is a lengthy mine train with a twist.

A couple of the rows face the wrong way, so of course you have to ride it more than once, and we did choose to ride backwards first. A really fun ride and an easy modification that other parks could make to get people to ride a coaster they're already familiar with.

Liking the signs in the station, I'm wondering if they're made on-site.

Another example of good theming, why just have a water fountain when you could filter it through a sock.

Heh heh!

We didn't see any snakes.

The Grand Exposition part of the park is full of rides designed for the youngsters and as such would prove difficult for all of us to ride the one coaster in there.

It was a bit of a squeeze but we were able to fit in.

Do they rebuild this every day or only when the fruit goes off.

In addition to the rides and the craft shows there are also bands such as this quartet who were doing Beatle covers of all things.

Having ridden the waterboggan at Dollywood and getting totally soaked I chose to give this one a miss.

However I was unable to avoid the water entirely as I got completely soaked in their water playground.

and it was this that got me the wettest. A simple game where hitting the targets causes another cannon to fire back and the small red paddles beneath the targets rotate those cannons. So the challenge is that whilst you're trying to take other people out, they're doing the same to you. The fact I got so wet can only mean others were playing it better than I was.


The rapids looked quite wet in places, mostly around the upcharged water cannons where people could pay to shoot at people they don't know.

Another children's playground. Now having seen those rope bridges in Europe and saying you'd never see them in the US and UK it was nice to be proved wrong by this park.

Fire in the Hole is a dark ride/coaster variant where you board a fire engine and spiral to the top of a building passing many vignettes before shooting back down to ground level. Quite a fun little ride.

I was wearing this T-Shirt and the ride op after staring at it for a while asked if I was a fireman as there was one on it. I didn't want to upset him by telling him that he'd missed the point of the t-shirt, which I'd chosen to wear especially being in the Kansas area.

The newest ride in the park was the Giant Swing, which wasn't easy to find; the only downside to a park buried in the trees.

We saw this on the way to the swing. It makes a change from panning for gold I guess.



Liking the signs found in the queue line for the swing.

The swing itself is alright but given the time spent searching for it I came away a little underwhelmed.

Chris can't read the sign.

The park has a stream train, if you can find it.

Along the way there's a scene played out with Sherrifs and train robbers. It killed 10 minutes I suppose.

After a wonderful lunch (the best food of the trip) and a fun competition held by the park we said our goodbye ready to head for the next park.

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