How we almost died in the Titanic Steerage

It is true.  We had a near death experience on Saturday in the Titanic.  Not many people live to say that....between 700-730 to be mostly exact.  And three chicks  from Kansas City.  :)

So, Branson is home to the world's largest Titanic exhibit.  Because nothing makes more sense that Branson would be the home.  Land-locked state, foreign ship, no Missourians on board....perfect sense.

All the workers are dressed as maids and ships officiers as to make the experience that much more authentic.  I paid over $20,000 dollars 15 years ago to learn that type of museum is called "interpretive."  Good use of my college education this morning for sure!

Parts of the ship are made to scale from the original ships blue prints.  It is really a nice museum, especially given it is only 15 miles from a town named Omaha, Arkansas, home of a guard goat (see below).

The museum collection is woth over $4 million dollars.  It is very well done.  I am not a museum curator but Mr. Fun's uncle is and since we are related, I am sure some of his knowledge has spilled over to me.  He created the Shania Twain museum so it has to count for something. 

Back to my near death tale.

As we going through the exhibit, a strange sort of yelling went on in the admission area, and then everyone was evacuated.  As we peered over the bannister down below, I was wondering if perhaps it was part of the tours....pretending something terrible was going to come along--I mean it makes sense--we are on the TITANIC!  Since there wasn't a lot of icebergs on Highway 76 where the museum sits, perhaps pretending a tornado would do the trick.  So my mother says to the two museum people "Are we having a tornado?"  They were like "duh..." so my mom says again, "I think they said a tornado is coming."  The workers were like "whatever...we have time to take your cheesy picture for the overpriced snapshot of you photoshopped on the grand staircase"  Tornado or not, we stopped for two shots...which I am sad to report did not look as good as this chick below.  Maybe it is because we didn't have the dress.

It is true.  A tornado or some sort of weather bad thing did come along.  We got shuttled down the Grand Staircase to the Steerage level (hello, everyone died there...we just read it on the museum plaques)

so we weren't feelig that optimistic.  The Girl was freaked.

So, we heard the winds.  We had our handy staff in full costume saying "here are the flashlights in case we lose power."  The whole thing was a little surreal.  Acutally, it made me laugh, which made the Girl that much more crazy.

The pictures you are about to see are contraband...however, as we were almost dying in the third level hallway, I figured all the "no photos" rules could be bent.

evacution

Not sure why these workers were smiling...

Another interesting thing happened while we were almost dying in Steerage.

This guy who was squished up against us turns to my mother (and my mother only) and out of the blue says, "Do you know where you are going after this?"

I thought it was a strange question.  Here we are, in tornado warning, wind flying about and he was wondering about our plans after the musuem tour.  Did he know we had scored front row seats to the Brule` concert that night and wanted to hone in on our action?

My mom then said a strange answer.  "Yes.  Heaven."

Heaven?  What did I just miss?

Then the wacky guy says, "How do you know?" 

He then went on to "Spanish Inquisition" my mother about her eternal salvation and how did she really know that Jesus was cool with her....

It actually was very intrusive and inappropriate.  We were jammed tight with all these strangers and he was asking some very personal questions....I would laid in to him but holy hannah!  We were in lock down.  We didn't know when we were getting out.  We didn't know if we were going to go see Jesus sooner than I have planned, so I figured I shouldn't spend my last earthy moments saying "Hey Nosey Dude, leave my mother alone and shut the hell up." 

The happy ending of our story is that we survived.  The tea party tent outside with dozens of cute little girls was flipped and dragged away.  Tables were flipped.  There were some signs of minimal destruction throughout Branson, but nothing big. 

We celebrated by having some snacks at the Denny's and indian rock opera-ing with Brule` later than night.  Sans the nosey Titanic guy. 

You can now say that you know three survivors of another Titanic disaster.  Man, that boat must be cursed.