The article in Wikipedia under the heading "tourist trap" explains very clearly and with a hint of irony the meaning of the phrase, and lists a large number of the better-known places. The final entry under North America is, "the Tennessee cities of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg have numerous tourist traps."
"Numerous" is an understatement which could be enriched by editing it to read "too numerous to mention".
OK, so Dolly Parton was born in Sevierville. That explains the Dollywood attraction. But how about all those other wall-to-wall traps that do everything from stuff you with pancakes to fling you around in a vertical wind tunnel.
None of the above, not even the food, attracted us. As the driver on the trip, I had to negotiate the passage through Gatlinburg to the mountains. Crawling along at an average of perhaps two miles an hour reminded me of the time we drove to Canada up I-75 and got caught in an interstate parking lot between two exits miles apart. I seem to recall it took 2 hours to drive 10 miles.
Since we're not great photographers, I figured that YouTube would fill in the gaps.
This video gives you one person's experience driving through the town. Traffic, people, and multiply by two, and you have our experience.
The real attraction, of course, is the mountains themselves, and the thrill ride is driving the twisty-turny US-441 that takes you to Clingman's Dome. Once there, we were content to watch the perpetual fog blow in over the slopes, and the hundreds of tourists who hiked up and down the trail. We were not among them. Although posted with handicap wheelchair signs, it is clear that an electrically-assisted chair would be the only reasonable way to hike to the top. Walking normally, the hike is 30 minutes to the outlook tower. We came, we saw, we demurred.
And then, there's the bears. This one clouted a car back a few years ago. That bear really knew how to trap tourists.
2 comments:
Glad to have you back, if indeed you are. Or are you writing from your trip? Or trap?
Traffic, moving at a snail's pace, is the main memory I'll have of our pilgrimage. There should be another word... pilgrimace... to convey the look one has when the GPS doesn't route the driver to a bypass because it's programmed to take the "shortest route" instead of the "shortest time". But we did make it back, though perhaps not in one piece.
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