What are the best day trips from Branson?

Eureka Springs over everything else for a couple's day out. The town sits 80 km west on US-62, about 75 minutes by car. Thorncrown Chapel, designed by E. Fay Jones and completed in 1980, rises 48 feet of glass and wood from the Ozark forest floor. You'll smell pine resin and warm wood the moment you step inside, and the light through 425 windows shifts every few minutes. The 1886 Crescent Hotel charges $22 for a basement ghost tour that is corny in the best way. For lunch, Local Flavor Cafe on Spring Street does a roasted beet salad with Arkansas goat cheese for about $14. Eureka Springs' main strip gets congested by 11am on summer weekends, and downtown parking runs $5-10 in pay lots. Leave Branson by 8:30am to have the chapel done before tour buses arrive.

Bentonville is 100 km west, about 90 minutes on US-71. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which Alice Walton opened in 2011, charges no admission and holds a collection running from Asher Durand to Andy Warhol. The Moshe Safdie building sits in a wooded ravine, and the 1.5-mile trail loop passes Frank Lloyd Wright's Bachman-Wilson House, relocated from New Jersey in 2015. This is the best split-interest day within 100 km of Branson. One of you spends 3 hours in the galleries while the other rides the Slaughter Pen mountain bike trails, free and 2 km from the museum entrance. You meet for dinner at The Hive inside 21c Museum Hotel, where the smoked trout appetizer runs about $16 and the noise level tends to stay reasonable.

Dogwood Canyon Nature Park sits 30 km south of Branson, barely across the Arkansas line. Johnny Morris, the Bass Pro Shops founder, owns the 10,000-acre property. The 2-hour horseback ride ($85 per person) follows a creek through limestone bluffs where the air drops 5-6 degrees under the canopy. Trout fishing on the spring-fed water runs $69 for a half-day with catch-and-release gear included, and the water stays cold enough to numb your fingers even in June. Worth noting, Dogwood Canyon is the low-effort day trip from Branson. The drive takes 35 minutes, the park handles all equipment, and you're back by mid-afternoon for a show on the Strip.

Roaring River State Park, 100 km southwest near Cassville, is Missouri's best trout park but skews toward serious anglers rather than couples looking for atmosphere. Springfield, 65 km north on US-65, has Wilson's Creek National Battlefield where Nathaniel Lyon was killed in 1861 ($10 entry, 5-mile driving tour) and the original Bass Pro Shops flagship, which is free to walk through and frankly more interesting as architecture than as a retail store. That said, Springfield is a working city, not a destination town, and the 45-minute drive each way barely justifies a half-day unless one of you has a real interest in Civil War history or the Route 66 corridor through the old commercial district.