Smokey Mountains
We traveled to Pigeon Forge, TN in the end of October 2001 to see all the Fall colors throughout the area. We had a wonderful time there... We spent about a week in the area.
When we got there we first visited Dollywood. We didn't think that it would really be somewhere we would like to visit, but we loved it! We thought it would be a lot more commercialized than it was.. That night we went across the road from Dollywood and stayed at the KOA campgrounds there in the van. We rented a couple of movies and had a great time staying there.
The next day we went through the mountains and took tours through about every area we could find. We headed through the mountains towards Cherokee, NC where we thought we would stay for the night. On our way we stopped by Clingman's Dome, but it had already become too dark for us to see anything. We arrived in Cherokee around 8PM after a very long day. After spending an hour or so looking through the area, we decided to head back to Pigeon Forge. Cherokee seemed to be way too commercialized. We were not very impressed at all. While heading back to Pigeon Forge (2 hours or so) it began to STORM! There were wind advisories for the mountain areas that we were going through. We finally made it and immediately started looking for a place to stay. We tried the KOA from the night before, but they were already booked all the way! We tried about 10 more hotels before we finally found one on the main strip in Pigeon Forge. The name of the place was Timber Lodge. The outside and inside closely resembled a log cabin and they were very cozy!
The next morning we decided to go to Gatlinburg and do some shopping! We spent a lot of the day there. We went to the local Fall Craft Fair there. It was huge and had about everything you could imagine. We hopped from shop to shop after that. As we started to slow down from the aching in our legs from walking we decided that we would see one of the shows in the area since we hadn't been to one yet. We went to Dixie Stampede first, since that was the main one there. Marizza got out and stood in line to get tickets while I circled the parking lot, since I didn't want to park just yet. After about 15 minutes or so, she gets back in and said that the guy in front of her got the LAST tickets! We were somewhat disappointed, but we didn't let that get us down... We saw this commercial on TV that morning about this place on the strip called The Comedy Barn. The commercial was quite goofy and we thought that it might be a place to get us in a happier mood. The show there was awesome! We laughed the whole time. We aren't ones to buy movies, key chains, T-shirts and all that stuff, but at this place we did. We had such a blast we wanted to take it with us! We would highly recommend this place to anyone. They really keep the show clean, and that really impressed us! We once again stayed at the same hotel and slept hard!
The next morning we went out again and began to shop. There were only a couple of stores that we had missed the day before that we really wanted to go to. We went to this woodcraft shop that we saw on TV and really loved the stuff he had. We went in because we saw these little cabins he was selling for incense and we ended up spending over $600 in there. We bought a very nice cedar chest in there along with some other stuff! After that, we found a little putt putt in the side of the mountain called Hillbilly Golf. We played a game there and really had fun! After the game, we headed straight home to Ohio.
We really had a blast in the Smokey's and hope to go back
soon!
The memories we made there will last a lifetime!
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