Another weekend has passed. We have been monitoring the weather and road reports almost hourly the whole weekend and it looks like it will be safe to head south Monday. But it is going to be touchy, there is another giant storm building in Canada and predicted to push all the way to the Gulf. We are going to go for it. We are leaving post haste and going to see if we can outrun the new storm.
Our intermediate goal is to get to Branson, MO for a few days of play before reporting to our next camp host gig. The four years that we lived in Oklahoma we were within an easy days drive of Branson but regretted that we never made it over to enjoy what it had to offer. In those four years I was traveling 200 nights a year for work and we grew our family from the two of us to four. Most of those four years are a blur of a memory for both of us. So we have decided to remove that regret and see what Branson is all about, even if it is out of season.
With storms in front of us and storms behind us we start south. The GPS and every other mapping software we have wants to take us east through Kansas City, then turning south for Springfield, MO. I want nothing to do with I-70 to KC. It is rough, hard jarring and heavily tolled once you get near the city. We get the good old road atlas out and manually map our own route straight south out of Junction City through the corn and wheat fields of Kansas. The roads got narrow from time to time but overall it was a very pleasant ride. We made a good choice of routes.
As we approached Springfield we could see that we were catching up with the storms in front of us. We decided not to dive into shafts of rain and hail we could easily see. Springfield would have to be it for today. More precisely, we got a site at Stafford RV Park in Stafford, MO, about 25 minutes north east of Springfield. The campground was right off of I-44, a one-man operation. The one man was the owner, manager, camp host, handy man and janitor. No pavement here, we had to straddle mud ruts and were instructed to get one of the "high" sites so that the expected night's rain would not leave us in a miniature lake. Here in the flat-graded campground high is a relative term. Mere inches separated high from low.
We got unhitched and hooked up just in time to step inside before the sky opened up. We spent the evening dry and cozy with good, strong cell signals and researched tomorrow's weather. It looked like the storms behind us were going to over run the storms in front of us tomorrow. We are going to have to hang here a day or so.
Turns out our campground is sandwiched between I-44 and the old Route 66 "Mother Road". We get to put another notch in our Route 66 belt as we have never been on this section of it before. It also works out to be the best way to get into Springfield, which we learn is the headquarters city of Bass Pro Shops. We figure to go into Springfield after breakfast and visit Bass Pro then scout out a place for lunch and cruise Springfield for awhile.
In Springfield all signs lead to Bass Pro, it was easy to find. Even without the signs it would have been easy, the place was massive. It looked like they were two city blocks long and a full city block deep. there was parking for thousands. This place even had its own conference center! Inside was even more amazing. I estimate the ceiling height reached forty feet in the center open area of the building with tiered levels of shopping departments, museums and restaurants along the walls. Yep, I said museums and restaurants. And everywhere you looked were nature scenes, just incredible taxidermy and wildlife modeling. It was not unreasonable to have the urge to get a pair of binoculars to get a better look at the ones higher up. I can't imagine how many millions of dollars they have in their nature scenes.
We definitely were not going to see all of this place in the couple of hours we thought we would. Heck, we spent that long in the gun and bow museums alone.
Many hours later we were in Bass Pro overload. We had not seen the whole place but we had seen all that we were going to. I'm not sure but I think we hit a Sonic Drive In on the way home and called it a day. It looks like we may be able to travel tomorrow. It should be less than two hours to Branson but we will have to wait until later in the morning to leave to give the last of the weather time to clear out. No more flatlander driving from here on, we'll be negotiating the mountains of the Ozarks.
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