Wednesday, July 25. 2007
We planned a few months ago on attending a gathering of “birds of a feather” for those active in the RV forum at iRV2.com being held in Branson, Missouri and were looking forward to being tourists in Branson and meeting people with whom John has met electronically on the Internet. (Comment 3/8/2010 – John is no longer at iRV2 for various reasons – find him on the Winnebago forum at rvforum.net.) Some RV rallies are huge involving literally a few thousand RVs, and some are small like this one involving less than a hundred. This rally was several days in duration and included several activities including various technical seminars and organized trips. One trip was a Branson tour on World War Two era amphibious vehicles which the Army called a DUKW but always referred to as “Ducks.” We spent about an hour driving around Branson and maybe 20 minutes in the lake near Branson. The experience was a “ho-hummer” – it was hot, noisy, and not that exciting spending most of your time on the road and a few minutes in the water. We attended a show at the Pierce Arrow Theater that features a pretty good comedian but the musical entertainment was at best maybe cruise-ship quality. Our last day of organized
activities featured a dinner and show on the showboat “Branson Belle. This was a purpose-built boat for the lake in Branson and is not really that great to look at. It looks like a barge with a hotel-like superstructure cobbled on top. John sincerely hopes the naval architect who designed that vessel, and the financial backers have nightmares about how ugly it turned out. The show however was simply outstanding featuring several singer/dancers, a Russian dance/acrobat couple, a good band, and a very funny ventriloquist with “talking” dogs.
While in Branson, we attended the nearby Tri-Lakes church for Sunday worship service which is held in one of the several ex-commercial theaters which have been purchased by area churches. The service began at 10:30 AM and when we walked into the auditorium, we were amazed at the large size (it must seat 2,000 people) and then further amazed at the quality of the 100% contemporary music of the service. There was a praise chorus, praise group and several musicians that must be mostly professional talent from the Branson area. It was so good, we thought we were in one of those TV commercials advertising CD/DVD sales of contemporary Christian music. The service lasted TWO HOURS! We must say, it didn’t seem that long and we felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in that gathering of God’s people!
We have had a minor but ever-existing intermittent problem with the air conditioning on the coach blowing warm air after we have spent a day of traveling. Once we are hooked up and stationary, the air conditioning works fine. Thanks to our good friend and
advocate at Winnebago Service Administration, he arranged for the air conditioning manufacturer to troubleshoot the problem. So we headed to Wichita, Kansas after Branson to meet with the factory technician to have this problem diagnosed. He met us at the campground as we arrived and of course the air conditioning worked perfectly unlike the last few traveling days. Dale (the tech) wanted to replace the control board which contains all of the operating electronics for the system, so that’s what we had done the next morning. Fingers crossed the intermittent problem has now disappeared.
We are now working our way back to Elkhart, Indiana to have our new captain’s chairs installed (we received a phone call today that they are in) and to have our new problem with the washing machine/dryer combo repaired. It’s always something!