Lucy and Sam's Wedding Website

Today we decided to go to Dollywood in Pigeon Forge. It’s quite a massive place, and took us over 4 hours to see all of the attractions (as well as stopping for a couple of snack breaks).

When you first park up, you are taken to the main attractions area by a ‘trolley’ (to give you an idea of scale, the car park alone is about the size of a football field). After you’ve paid for your tickets and walk through into the amusement park, you are immediately greeted by a member of staff who asks if you want your photo taken (presumably to purchase at a sizeable fee later) – we politely declined and got a map of the park afterwards to navigate our way around.

We decided to refuel ourselves first of all by having a bite to eat at one of the restaurants in the park. We ordered a couple of really yummy veggie burgers which came with huge steak chips, and some onion rings. I’m glad we didn’t order any starters – we couldn’t finish our meals as they were so massive!

When we finally managed to digest enough of our meal to enable us to move, we set off exploring the park. Today was about 35 degrees celsius, a very hot and humid day as you can imagine so a lot of the people visiting the park went on the various water rides such as Mountain Slidewinder and Daredevil Falls. Walking around, we noticed they had lots of upright fans outdoors which sprayed fine mists of water at the same time – we made sure we walked past a lot of them to cool down a bit!

One of the areas we went to was the Eagle Mountain Sanctuary, a 30,000 square foot aviary which houses one of the biggest collection of non-releaseable American Bald Eagles in the USA. The birds they keep are unable to be released into the wild due to either being injured/shot by people in the past whilst in the wild, or have been too used to being around humans when they were younger and so wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild.

We were sat down near the front of a stage where the keepers were talking about the birds and gave live demonstrations of them flying around above the audience – one of the birds even brushed right past Lucy’s face! Dollywood apparently participates in a programme to help breed bald eagles as their numbers in the wild are quite low – so far they have helped to breed 101 pairs of eagles for release into the wild which is pretty cool.

At the end of the show they invited visitors to make donations towards the programme – you can give a note to one of the birds (an African Pied Crow called Friar Tuck or Tuck for short) who will promptly insert the note into a box in exchange for some food from his handler!

When the show finished we observed the eagles in their aviaries for a few minutes and one thing we thought was interesting, was listening to the eagles calling to each other – we can sometimes hear the same calls in the woods outside our cabin!

We did some more exploring of the park, going to a few gift shops and even having a guided tour of Dolly’s old tour bus (which is a bit like a hotel on wheels!) – it apparently cost her $750,000 but her new one cost a mind boggling $1.2 million! The tour guide was telling us that they had the floor lowered in her new tour bus as her husband is 6ft 6in tall and didn’t really have much in the way of clearance space in the old bus!

Anyway, here are a few photos from Dollywood to give you a brief insight to what the park is like!

Sam