Pigeon Forge and The Smokey Mountains, TN

3rd – 10th October

The Smokey Mountains National Park and the nearby town of Pigeon Forge were plucked from the guide book to be the rendezvous spot for us to meet up with the Family Thelen for 4 days. Our friendship began when we met them in that bastion of social interaction, a large public laundrette in Upper Penisula Michigan last year. We spent a fun July 4th with them that week  in Copper Harbor and then spent a weekend camping on their driveway in their home town of Detroit in late August. We had made grand plans to meet up somewhere on our return this year and we actually pulled it off!  They heroically drove their large trailer, 2 kids (KJ 11 & Coen 12) and the cat (Kim, age unknown)  more than 500 miles to meet us at an RV resort in Pigeon Forge where we had booked neighbouring sites.

Pigeon Forge. We knew it was going to be touristy, but we had no idea the heights to which this touristy-ness would soar. It’s name suggests a cute little historic town that might have organically expanded to accommodate and amuse the folk coming to visit the Smokey Mountains National Park, the most visited national park in the country. No sign of this. The town is essentially a 3 mile strip of newly built hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, cowboy boot stores, dinner show venues, outlet villages, go-karting, mini golf and moonshine tasting rooms.  It is also home to Dollywood, a theme park done in a country style endorsed by, and named for, the area’s most famous daughter Ms Dolly Parton.  It is obvious that the reason this national park is so visited, is that the hoards now make the pilgrimage to the entertainment, shopping and eating mecca that is Pigeon Forge also pop into the park whilst they are here.

It is bonkers. Like a mini Vegas without the casinos. A temple of consumerism and hedonism serviced by the combustion engine. It was unseasonably hot and crazy busy. We were not going to be bored here.

Our camp site was tucked about half a mile behind the strip and was a peaceful retreat from the melée. We spent our first evening around the camp fire, catching up, eating barbecued chicken and planning our activities for the next few days.

Day 1: DOLLYWOOD!

Luckily Todd and Keta’s truck has 6 seats, so we all piled in and were in the park by 10.30am. Today was Thursday, so it made it a bit quieter. Based on the size of the car park, it must get unfeasibly busy on peak days.  The park has about 6 big rollercoasters and we had done 5 of them, without any significant waiting by 11.30. The park was beautifully decorated for ‘Fall’* with pumpkins and autumn leaf garlands everywhere.  After dark there are ‘pumpkin illuminations’, and lots of folk come specifically to see them. We walked, lunched, rode the steam train, did the rides (dry and wet), got hot, and generally had a lot of fun. There wasn’t really a huge influence of Dolly Parton here except the piped music around the park and her old tour bus is here and open to look inside. It cost $750,000 in 1994, did more than 600,000 miles and is decorated inside all in shades of rose pink with gold accents. It even has a teeny tiny bath so that she could have bubble baths. She upgraded to a new bus in 2010 for $2.4million and donated the old bus to the park. At 72 years young she is still touring and living on the road for 6 months each year.  The woman is a legend!  By mid afternoon energy levels were waning so we headed back to camp for a couple of hours and returned to the park at dusk to see the pumpkin decoration light displays. Very impressive. They used to use only real pumpkins, but found that they kept rotting before the end of the display (not so decorative…), so this year the park spent nearly $1.5 million on fake pumpkins. We managed to sneak in a couple more coaster rides and then headed home again, picking up some pizza and wings on the way.

Day 2: Pigeon Forge Excursion

Today we surrendered to the greater might of HOLIDAY FUN IN PIGEON FORGE. Late morning we caught the ‘Fun Time Trolley’ (a normal bus disguised as an old time tram with uncomfortable garden benches where the seats should be) from our camp to the strip. We started our day with a round of mini-golf. With 6 playing, this killed nearly 2 hours. It was baking hot, with minimal shade and some holes were more about surviving from heatstroke than holding par. Some enjoyed it more than others (Sorry KJ) and some were better than others (Another victory for Hampson over me). We then cooled down by sending the kids to get ice-cream whilst we did a moonshine tasting session, the lesser known cure for mild dehydration…Our host at the tasting room was comically bad. She was either having a bad day, or was having a good day in her poorly chosen profession of hospitality and customer service because neither was evident in her repertoire. When we asked for a glass of water, she harrumphed and gave us each a 20ml offering of tepid tap water in a plastic tasting thimble. Mmm. Refreshing. Hydrating. We smirked our way through our rapi-tasting of 7 or 8 shots of moonshine and by the end of it, much merrier for the duel effects of booze on an empty stomach and Miss Grumpybritches’ amusingly distracted  behaviour, followed it up with a mid-afternoon moonshine cocktail. Our next stop was our our 5 pm booking at a dinner show, Hatfield and McCoy’s Dinner Feud. We arrived at the requested time of 4.30pm (basically still mid-afternoon) and had to join the queue which cleverly was engineered to snake us through the gift shop. Then we had our group photo taken with hillbilly props before being seated at our table.  Here, we were served an all-you-can-eat-in ten minutes fried chicken dinner with all the trimmings served at-table prior to the hillbilly themed show. It was gloriously cheesy and very entertaining. There was music, dancing, slapstick comedy and crowd participation. All the things I normally avoid if I am looking to be entertained. One scene involved the stage floor disappearing into a 10m swimming pool and the cast doing various jumps and dives into the water. They even had 3 performing dogs doing the same. Quite impressive. The show was finished by 6.45pm and having easily resisted buying our group photo, the DVD or anything from the gift shop, we caught the trolley back to camp for another campfire and some beers.

Day 3: Smokey Mountains National Park

After the excesses of yesterday, today was our day to get into the national park and stretch our legs. We were on the road at 9am with a picnic packed and plans to escape the mayhem of Pigeon Forge. Our first stop was Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Tennessee. You can drive to within 0.5  mile of the summit, where there is a large car park, then ‘hike’ up the beautifully paved path to the summit and lookout. We arrived in time to secure about the last free space in the carpark and joined the crowds in the pilgrimage to the top. The famous Appalachian Trail, the 2200 mile/3500 km walking trail comes through this spot and there were a few very serious hiking looking people interspersed with us ‘strollers’. The leaves are just starting to change up here but the fantastic display of fall colour of the trees is still a few weeks away and unfortunately the summit was shrouded in cloud so the view from the very stylish spiral observation lookout was about zilch. As we drove down from the summit the queue of traffic waiting for a space to park was about 1 mile long. The perils of popular tourism. We then hunted for a trail to do that wasn’t too steep or too long or too busy. The options were limited, but we found one after a bit of a drive. We had our tailgate picnic and went for a ramble.  En route we introduced the Thelens to the art of panoramic selfies.

We took the long way home to avoid the traffic and  back-tracking, stocked up at the supermarket for dinner supplies, stopped at a souvenir shop with a live alligator display for KJ and headed home for another lovely evening of campfire, beer and talking rubbish.

Day 4: Goodbyes and then not much.

In the morning we sadly had to say goodbye to our companions who reloaded the family and trailer and embarked on their gruesome 11 hour drive to return to Detroit. We really appreciated the effort it took to get down here, and are glad to have spent some quality time with you all. You are also legends, my friends. You and Dolly Parton.

We had decided to stay another 2 nights here and spent the rest of the day in a state of ‘first gear’. We went nowhere.

Day 5: Gatlinburg, nearly.

There is a town about 7 miles from Pigeon Forge called Gatlinburg. It is equally touristy and busy, but smaller and with a different vibe. We decided to go there today. It was too hot and there was too much traffic to safely cycle so we decided to take the trolley again There is a trolley link between Pigeon Forge and the Gatlinburg Welcome Centre which connects with the Gatlinburg trolley bus into the town. Easy!

Easy? It took us 80 minutes and 2 trolleys to get from our camp to the Welcome Centre where there was a queue about 70 people long waiting to catch the trolley into Gatlinburg. Each trolley only takes 30 people and only arrives one per 30 mins. There was no way of walking. The maths was done. The will to live was lost. We called an Uber and went home.

We had failed at tourism today and we were much happier for it. We spent the afternoon doing a bit of a sorting out of TC in preparation for getting back on the road tomorrow and then had another dunk in the pool. Having met our new neighbours, Stom and Katherine from North Carolina, they joined us for a few drinks that evening around our campfire.

We left the mayhem of Pigeon Forge the next day, headed for a ‘halfway to Nashville’ single night stop in Crossville. En route we stopped at the town of Oak Ridge to visit the newly opened American Museum of Science and Energy. Oak Ridge was a town entirely manufactured from scratch during WW2 as one of the three sites of the Manhattan Project for the development and manufacture of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan. It is still a very important site worldwide for nuclear energy research and as a safety and storage facility for nuclear material from decommissioned warheads. The small museum was a bit technical and dry, but interesting nonetheless. Our night in Crossville was unremarkable except for it being alcohol-free with a vegetarian dinner. Remarkable!

*Fall: I think this needs a whole seperate post!