One of my favorite memories as a young boy was the time my family went tent camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I especially enjoyed riding the white water of one of its many streams on an air mattress. So I was anxious to visit the park again.
We decided to make Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a town just a few miles to the west of the park, our tour headquarters. On the map it looked like just an average burg, and about the only thing of substance we knew about it was that Dollywood, Dolly Parton's amusement park, was there.
A couple of miles away from our campground, at around 4 PM, the traffic got heavy. Los Angeles rush hour heavy. As we crawled along, we took notice of some interesting establishments along the way. A Titanic museum. Hatfield and McCoy Dinner Theater. Jurassic Jungle Boat Ride. Christ in the Smokies. An Elvis Museum. Every fast food restaurant and amusement ride and outlet store ever franchised. Mile after mile of that stuff. In short, the greatest collection of entrepreneurial tackiness and bad taste I've ever seen. Don't miss it if you get the chance.
After pulling into our campground, I plugged our electrical cable into the pedestal's 50 amp service. There was a little flash, and the pedestal's circuit breaker was tripped. That knocked out our TV and most of our wall outlets. It turned out that our inverter (the component that takes house battery power and converts it into 120 volt, 60 cycle house current) had blown. This meant that we had no television service - an obviously unacceptable situation for the little woman and myself, especially since there were two important football games coming up that weekend. I came up with a temporary television fix by plugging an extension cord into the one working outlet in the living area.
Our campground was a nice one, and with a discount offer we couldn't refuse, and a working TV set, we ended up staying there for five days.
Every morning Nancy drove down to Krispy Kreme and brought back coffee and a doughnut for each of us. We're still dealing with guilt over the calorie load. Nancy said that the store was full of divorced women battling the heartbreak of obesity and talking about their divorces.
The day after our arrival, a Saturday, we drove into the national park and headed toward Gatlinburg. We couldn't understand why traffic was so horrible until we realized that this was the Veterans Day three day weekend. Inside the park, it wasn't so crowded, and it was wonderful riding alongside the mountain streams that border many of the roads. We went for a nice long walk with Tammy Faye and Sophia on the only trail where dogs are allowed. Later in the day we saw a sign for an 11 mile scenic wildlife drive and turned onto that road, not realizing that it was one lane and filled with tourists who would stop at every rumor of bird or mammal, blocking everyone behind them. There were times when we didn't move for five or ten minutes, and when we got a look at what everybody was stopping for, it was a few deer or a coyote. Heck, we could have seen the same show on our front lawn back home. It took us an hour and a half to complete the circuit.
Nancy has complained for months about her purse. She dumps everything into it and has trouble quickly finding keys, cards, her phone, her camera, and everything else - because it has no divisions inside. I told her that I wanted her to buy a great new purse that will make it easy to organize, expense no object. In Pigeon Forge we passed a Handbag Superstore, and she found the purse of her dreams, at a price closer to K-Mart than Coach. I'm a lucky man.
After a weekend during which I watched, on our motorhome TV, Stanford lose to Oregon and the 49ers beat the New York Giants, we drove back to the national park and stopped in Gatlinburg, which is a slightly upscale version of Pigeon Forge. It has all sorts of attractions - Ripley's Believe It or Not, Guiness Book of World Records, and so on. It also has some cute restaurants. We had Shrimp Po-Boys at New Orleans Sandwich Company that were so good I don't think we'll find their match when we get down to the Big Easy. The bread was remarkable, with a thin crunchy crust, and our waitress said it was an old family recipe brought from New Orleans and baked to their specs by a local grocery store.
Just down the street we visited a working still and had a moonshine tasting. We bought a Mason jar of Apple Pie moonshine, which was the least disgusting version. For those fans of the TV show Justified, as we are, Apple Pie was also the moonshine flavor Mags used to poison somebody. The price was outrageous, of course, as is the case with most tourist traps.
We enjoyed Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and the Smokies - but the traffic was so overwhelming that we probably won't be back anytime soon.
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