Negative-G - Silver Dollar City - November 2013 - An Old Time Christmas

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An Old Time Christmas at Silver Dollar City, Branson, Missouri

I love traveling with all of my "coaster family" of friends throughout the year. We all have a great time visiting parks and riding coasters together but the most important trips to me are the ones where there is just one person along for the ride. That person is of course my son Bond.

Some years we are able to have father and son coaster trips often and some years like this one time just doesn't work out and most of our trips are with friends. With that in mind as this coaster season came to a close Bond and I took a couple of days (weekdays due to my weird work schedule) and headed on down to Branson, Missouri for some quality time at what I find to be the best theme park in the Midwest. That park is Silver Dollar City.

The thought was that we wanted to end our 2013 season which included visiting 12 operating amusement parks, one abandoned amusement park and riding forty-nine different coasters (20 of them being new to me and 27 new for Bond) with a really big bang. With our current #1 ranked coaster in the world being Outlaw Run and with Silver Dollar City the only park within a 10 hour drive that was open it was a no brainer as to where we would go.

With a really insane schedule this fall between family, work and Bond's school activities at the last minute we decided on November 7th and 8th which happened to be the second weekend for Silver Dollar City's annual "An Old Time Christmas" festival for our visit. As a result the park was all decked out in Christmas trees, holiday shows and enough Christmas lights that would make a house glow enough to make it visible from outer space.

The last time we visited during An Old Time Christmas the crowds that piled up in the square before the park opened worried us as to whether we would get many rides in.

What we found out on that trip was that as soon as the ropes dropped the crowds would sprint (or speed on their scooters) down the hill and straight to one of Silver Dollar City's theaters for some of their Broadway class shows leaving the rides...