Can you elaborate on what went wrong at Silver Dollar City?
I posted my trip report
here, on the DISabilites Community Board, but in the service of advancing the discussion in this thread:
First of all, much of the Silver Dollar City theme park is simply not accessible to personal mobility devices of any kind: there are areas on the park map that show pathways with slopes that are far too steep for even manual wheelchairs or strollers to be used safely because of the possibility that if the user/pusher had to stop or lost control... the result would be a horrifying out-of-control ride to the bottom of the hill, if they didn't tip over first, or run over someone. All mobility devices and strollers are prohibited on those pathways. There are additional paths that are marked as "use with caution" where we discovered that
ECVs (including the park rentals) were able to go down very slowly, but still were unable to climb the slope as the grade was too steep (the units had to be pushed back to the top with great difficulty), and the wheelchair and stroller users we saw avoided those as well. There is no really safe or easy way to get from the top half of the park down to the bottom half of the park (where I wanted to take our DD to show her many of the "original" attractions from when I was a kid) and I was rendered a patient at First Aid for a time after two trips across a bumpy bridge that has thick tuffets of mossy grass growing up between the planks; it was literally the most painful surface I have ever ridden across.
Silver Dollar City (and Branson) are in the Ozarks; SDC was created as an "authentic" Ozarks experience, and is built on top of Marvel Cave at it's highest point (Hospitality House). While it is very pretty (especially at Christmastime, with all of the lights) sadly, it is a nightmare for anyone with any kind of mobility issues, and there are hills that even "healthy" adults struggle to walk up and down. Much of the Branson area, while catering directly and obviously to an aging Baby Boomer clientele, is ironically not at all, or barely ADA accessible. I was able to go further, and do more there than most people, simply because my personal mobility device is small and lightweight, which enabled me to use it places that a standard rental
scooter might not have been able to go. Some of the more recent attractions (like the Titanic, Ripley's, and the outdoor outlet mall) are fully accessible, or have accessible pathways, but the older places that are "original" to Branson, like Dicks 5 & 10 in the old downtown, have aisles that are so narrow that it is difficult for most ECVs to make the turns across the endcaps of the aisles to go down the next adjacent aisle.
I love Branson, and the people there are wonderfully friendly and personable, but it's a *LOT* of "work" for me to visit many of the attractions there.