We left Chattanooga in a torrential downpour. Memories of the flooded campground in New Brunswick flashed though our minds. Derrille hooked up the car and walked over to get the man who pumps propane. I drove the rig around to the propane station. During the filling, a more intense downpour sent water down the windshield in waves. I felt badly for Derrille and the kid filling the tank. Derrille apologized to him, but he didn't seem to mind getting wet. After Derrille changed into dry clothes we headed up the highway in the driving rain. 
The RV park in Sevierville was wet too. Right after Derrille unhooked the car and got us set up outside the rain stopped. Cows grazed in the pasture a row behind our rig.
Our campsite location is Sevierville, pronounced Severe-ville or as the locals say Suh-ver-vul. The RV park sits alongside the Little Pigeon River. This busy little town lies about 30 minutes east of Knoxville, but just up the road from Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. The three little towns form the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains. Dolly Pardon calls Sevierville home. Her Dollywood Amusement Park is here too, in Pigeon Forge. Dollywood has 30 shows each day, an amusement park, a craft village, shops, a carnival row etc. The senior price is about $52 per person. We will probably pass on going there.The day following the big storm, the sun came out with a blue sky, and autumn shone in all its beauty. We went to town. Sevierville supports a Super Wal-Mart and a Tanger Factory Outlet center. As Seen on TV stores can be found in several places from Sevierville to Pigeon Forge. These are Lily's Jewelry stores and Billy's Seen on TV Items. We even saw a tool outlet center...toys for big boys. Russell Stover's has a factory store here and so does Coleman. There is a Knife Museum too.
Next we headed for Pigeon Forge. The three lanes each way separated by the median reminded us of Ocean City. At the north end of town several live performance theaters invite you in. The WonderWorld Theater looks like an upside down house. The Blackbear Jamboree, Comedy Barn, Country Tonight Theater, Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede, Magie Beyond Belief, and The Miracle Theater are part of the 15 or so live show theaters. This part of town reminded us of Branson, MO. 
The twin stacks of the The Titanic Museum stand out among the theaters. Moving farther down the street, visitors find a multitude of miniature golf sites (just like Ocean City), small amusement parks for tots to teens fill the town, video arcades, a couple of laser tag places and several raceways for go-cart type race cars. We counted at least 15 pancake houses plus all the other restaurants and fast food places.The large number of motels and hotels probably keep all these places in business. One T-shirt store looks exactly like the one in South Padre Island, open shark jaw entrance and all. Gift and specialty, and souvenir shops abound next to the ice cream and fudge stores. Several antique stores occupy places along the street too. We can only imagine how crowded this vacation destination must be in the summer. We drove up to find Dollywood, but we could only find the parking lots. Shuttles take you to the main gate.
Next we followed the highway toward the Smoky Mountains to the town of Gatlinburg. What a quaint town! Upscale Gatlinburg provides tourist shoppers and white water rafters a destination in summer and snowboarders and skiers a winter destination. The town sits in a narrow valley next to a river. The four lane Main Street and a street parallel to Main street make up downtown. Timber, brick and/or stone fronted buildings attach to one another from one end of town to the other. Gift shops, specialty shops and souvenir shops beckon the tourists to come in and buy. Several candy shops slide in between the other shops and restaurants. You can watch taffy being made in the picture window of one candy store. Every once in a while a small mall or lane opens to set back hotel or to a mall that extends from Main Street back about a half of a block. The Gatlinburg shops look more quality oriented than those of Pigeon Forge. Two chair lifts leave from downtown and carry people up to the top of the mountain and the resorts up there. Accommodations here look like large hotels, condos and cabins. Wedding Chapels dot the area. Small little churches vie for wedding business. Several formal attire stores can be found here too. Pigeon Forge advertises wedding rings and has a couple of chapels too. 
Gatlinburg even has their own space needle with an observation platform and an elevator to take you up.
A little ways out of town an eight mile loop passes through the Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community. Over 100 active artists reside along this route. Galleries and studios are open for viewing and buying the art. Broom makers, basket weavers, loom weavers, painters, glass, wood, and metal workers, instrument makers, etc.
After our drive through the three towns we returned to Pigeon Forge. Here we explored the Old Mill Village. 
Then we went to The Christmas Place. What a place! The Bavarian-style architecture sits among landscaped courtyards and gardens. In one garden trains rumble around the track.The store occupies 25,000 square feet of space. It felt magical just being inside. One area flowed into another. Getting lost was easy in this store with wonderful things to see everywhere you looked.The smells and sounds of Christmas fill the air. The store has a section for personalizing things, a section for regular ornaments, and local school inspired ornaments. A section has Christmas banners, another section has floral arrangements and yet another section has just lights or trees to purchase. Some sections specialize in decorations for music, kids, hillbillies, nature, patriotic, etc. Thomas Kincade, Mark Roberts, Radko and other special artists each have a section. A large room accommodates the Department 56 villages. A boutique offers personal and home decor, accessories and gifts. Throughout the store cute items are offered at sale prices.The star studded ceiling area provides display room for Christmas decor. Santa with his sleigh and reindeer fly acroos the sky high overhead. You can have your photo taken with Santa or purchase some yummy treat from Mrs. Claus' Candy Kitchen. I had to be strong and not bring home some things I didn't need or couldn't store.I loved this store!
The outside gardens were decorated with trains and mannequins dressed for winter.
Next we drove to Gatlinburg. A few bright displays stood out downtown. But out one of the main roads toward the artisan community several large, flat displays, 15 feet high by 20 feet long give or take the display, glowed in the night. 
We liked the light displays in Gatlinburg best. Both towns offered trolley tours to see the lights, but we decided that we could do this on our own. We did, and we enjoyed it, returning home later than we expected.
The Museum of Appalachia ranks as a "must-see" in the tour books. We agree! An authentic living mountain village describes the museum located about 16 miles north of Knoxville. The attraction offered the advertised bits and more.
The entrance passes split railed pastures with sheep, goats, and one big red coated longhorned bull. The gift shop contains beautifully crafted items made by over 200 local artists. Several of the items tempted me,but the high prices on the tags dampened that temptation. This building also contained some antiques, music CDs and a cafe.
Exiting the gift shop, a path to the right led us to the Hall of Fame. John Rice Irwin, the founder and director of the museum put together a Hall of Fame that includes famous, not so famous, and interesting mountain folk. Some of the early greats in country Music are featured. A large collection of banjos, guitars, mandolins, and dulcimers fill the walls. Each comes with an identifying tag and some history. 
We learned that the banjos originally came from Africa. They were made from gourds. The banjo came to the South with the slaves. On display are banjos made from a ham tin, a hubcap, and a bedpan. 
A section on Indian artifacts, mostly Cherokee, stood in glass cases. Another section highlighted crafts of the Appalachia. Basket making, wood working, and weave samples could be viewed.
Quilts hung from a variety of places around the museum. I tried to photography an optical section with glasses dating back to the 1700's, but the glass display cases and ceiling lighting didn't allow it.
Irwin even included a mountain doctor's hut complete with bottles of medicine. Plants used by the hill people hung in another floor to ceiling glass case. 
One man had built a small exact model of his grist mill, and donated it to the museum. The real mill sits at the end of the village.
Outside of the Hall of Fame we viewed this small shack that was actually used as a house. We found it hard to believe that a person could live in this minimal structure.
The Display Barn held tools and other mountain necessities: hand planes, axes, hammers, horse bits, saws, a general store and an old time post office. 
One of the things that struck Derrille and I , was the number of items in each display. Mr Irwin must have had 50-75+ hammers on the wall, 30-40 hand planes, 40-50 horse bits, cow and sheep bells, etc. Each display contained more examples than museum usually have. The brochure says the museum houses over a quarter million items! WOW! The intention of this museum is to look "lived in" as opposed to the lifeless "museum static displays" of other places. The village houses include bedding, clothes, dishes, and other items found in an Appalachia home.
The first home along our path belonged to Mark Twain's family. It was moved up from "Possum Trot, TN".
The McClung house included two parts separated by an open hallway. One half included an armoire: the other room used a rope and hangers for the clothes. This house also was used as a Civil War Hospital.
The Dan'l Boone cabin actually built in the 1800's and furnished with period artifacts was used on the TV show the Young Dan'l Boone.
The Big Tater Schoolhouse sits high on the ridge with one small slate blackboard and rows of benches. A girls' outhouse sits to the left and a boys' outhouse is off to the right. 
In the Peters House and Homestead, we stopped to listen to two local musicians play Bluegrass. One man played guitar and the other played the fiddle and harmonicas. They play for whoever stops by to visit.The red hat ladies loved it and so did I!
The long, narrow sawmill showed a piece of wood getting ready to move toward the blade, and one piece that had been cut.
A variety of hens and roosters strolled around the entrance building. Peacocks strolled wherever they wanted.
The cantilevered of overhang barn common t eastern Tennessee is rarely found in other parts of the country. 
The water powered grist mill ground corn and wheat.The authenticity of the Museum of Appalachia left us with a good idea of how mountain folk used to live, or maybe still live today in some parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, east of Sedro Woolly, WA and other other remote places of each state.
We finished off this day by driving through Knoxville. The downtown area seemed small with the usually array of large bank buildings and small shops. Every road seemed to lead to a freeway of some road out of town.
Most of Knoxville is consumed by the University of Tennessee. We wanted to see the campus. Jay worked at UT for a while years ago.We took the next day off and waited for the mobile repairman to come and put in a new refrigerator switch according to a Norcold recall notice. I finished up the hard copy updates for those without computers and we went to the post office and sent them off. We followed that with laundry and a pizza dinner.
The sky was overcast the Saturday morning we set off to the Sugarlands Smoky Mountains National Park Visitors Center. The center is located just two miles south of Gatlinburg. We expected a leisurely drive to Gatlinburg, but did not expect three lanes of bumper-to-bumper each direction from the campground to Pigeon Forge. Where did all these people come from in late November? As we crept along the highway we noticed a Saturday Flea Market on the other side of the street. At Tanger's Outlet Mall the parking lot looked at full capacity with drivers circling the rows seeking a place to park. Traffic thinned as we left Pigeon Forge. Upon entering Gatlinburg, the town looked deserted compared to Pigeon Forge. However....we were wrong again! The bumper-to-bumper appeared again in downtown Gatlinburg. Sidewalks were equally jammed with people. Large numbers of teens and young adults crowded corners and attraction entrances. Families and seniors joined the throngs shuffling from store to store.
The Smoky Mountains Visitor's Center included a small museum showing animals and plants of the park. The movie told us that 5 biospheres exist in the park, extending from below 4500 feet to above 6600 feet. Each level fosters the growth of a great diversity of animals and vegetation for the park. For example, the park contains more species of trees than exist in all of Europe. Its old growth trees comprise the largest collection east of the Mississippi River. Frogs, toads and salamanders also come with a great diversity. Salamanders live here that are found nowhere else in the world. The Hornbender Salamander grows to 3 feet in length. Originally this land provided homes for the Cherokee people. The Trail of Tears march moved them to Oklahoma. Some found ways to stay and later others returned to the eastern side of the park in Cherokee, our next stop. Settlers to the area also were forced to leave when the area became a National Park. 
This quilt in the museum area was interesting. The quilt is called the Great Smoky Mountain Sampler.It includes twelve patterns chosen to represent the stories and heritage of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
We took the road east from the center,toward Newfound Gap.
As the road passed the different trailheads, cars were parked everywhere: in the parking lot and out along the edges of the road. It reminded us of our day in Acadia NP in Bar Harbor, Maine.
The park is bisected by the Tennessee/North Carolina state boundaries.
Angling off from the main road we drove the seasonal road to Clingman's Dome. This area closes on December 1st, so we felt fortunate to see it. Snow patches appeared along the roadway. The seven mile drive took us high into the hills: elevation 6643 feet. From the parking lot a half mile trail leads to the observation tower. Half mile...???? No sweat!
Wrong again! This half mile paved trail curves a little as it ascends nearly straight up!!! As I huffed and puffed my way slowly uphill, we talked about fitness. Derrille pointed out a very fit young lady who was huffing and puffing just like me. One young adult said the trail felt like her treadmill set at #16! Her husband was pulling her up. Another lady said it helped if her husband pushed her from behind. Some husbands just went ahead. I took the trail photos after we had come down and the sun was beginning to set.
Finally we reached the top. The tower was in view, and so was its access ramp. We climbed some more. The cloverleaf ramp to the tower wasn't difficult as long as we watched out for the snow and ice patches along the way. Here is a photo looking down from the tower.
However the view made the climb worth it. 360 degrees of Smoky Mountain view. The sun peeked through the clouds, and I chalked up another personal best achievement. 
Then we started down. We passed one of the openings to the Appalachia Trail. As others had commented, going down at that grade created some other problems for toes, knees and hips depending on who you were. However, breathing was definitely no problem downhill. 
The moon rose over the Smokies as we headed back to town. We treated ourselves to a great dinner at the Texas Roadhouse in Pigeon Forge before going home. Although the Texas Roadhouse location map doesn't include any restaurants in Oregon, Washington or San Diego, it is one of our favorites in Arizona. The delicious dinner topped off another good day.
Next stop: North Carolina
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