Titanic

Our second day in Branson commenced with a visit to the Titanic Museum. The travelling Titanic exhibition was on show at the St Louis Science Centre when I first moved to the area but I didn't get the opportunity to visit it (which I regretted) & so this exhibition was on our 'must do' list. This is a permanent exhibition which opened in 2006 & contains over 400 items (including personal artifacts retrieved from the Titanic wreck), models of the boat, interactive displays & recreations of the boat interior. The exhibition was housed in a building constructed to look like the Titanic (complete with fountains to simulate the bow wave as the boat moved forward & an iceberg) which towered above the surrounding buildings & gave an appreciation of the size of the boat, even though the building was reduced in size compared to the actual boat!

As you lined up to enter 'the boat' you were given a boarding pass with a name on it & a brief description about the person that you now were. We had some of the most notable people (including the richest & youngest person on board) & as we passed through the museum there were some exhibitions about these people. We were 'checked in' by one of the crew who was supposedly English but it was immediately obvious to us that she wasn't & this was confirmed when she found out that we actually were - guess not that many people from England choose Branson as their vacation destination! At the end of the exhibition (after seeing how long we could keep our hands in a bowl of water cooled to the temperature of the North Atlantic on the night of the sinking - a chilly 28 degrees F) we got to check out if we lived or died on the Memorial Wall.

There were a number of interactive sections to the exhibition including touching the frozen surface of an 'iceberg', standing on the ship's bridge & operating the boat's controls before walking out & feeling the chill of the night, sending an SOS signal from the ship’s wireless room, & walking up the boat deck at different stages of the sinking. There were also a number of room recreations (with actual pieces of the Titanic) including a First Class Stateroom & Third Class cabin, & Grand Staircase (which was used to get between the upper & lower decks of the the exhibition. It was a really interesting exhibition & surprising to see how many people from places that we know in the southeast were on board.