The mountains, sans bears - Part I.

I spent all of last week in Gatlinburg. It was actually the first time I'd ever been to the area for any real amount of time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The chalet that my roommate had reserved was spectacular. It was eerily spacious, with plenty of room for everybody to have their space. It was also a primo place for hide-and-seek. More on that in a bit...

En route from the I-40 offramp to our residence for the week, I was a bit apprehensive. Sevierville was bland as hell - the place had nothing to see but a Super Wal-Mart, a couple of outlet malls (gag), and a handful of chain restaraunts. I could see the mountains ahead, so I just kept my apprehension to myself. Then we hit the next city...

I was a little taken aback by the heinously neon Pigeon Forge. I just didn't care for it. Luckily, I wasn't the only one caught off guard, and I wasn't nearly the most vocal with my disdain for the place...

I felt like I needed to have a pack of mullet-headed rube-children following me around, tugging on my clothes, begging for change from their "pa" to throw at the hordes of go-carts and do-it-yourself gem mines littering the strip to feel comfortable there. I'd make the kids get dressed in their best (actually wearing SHOES with their overalls...) for the only-slightly-classier ventures ranging from a dinosaur jungle boat ride (wtf?) to stores where Christmas comes 365 days a year (again, wtf?). It was definitely a tourist trap. Thank God we were too smart to be snared...

Gatlingburg was a cool city. It made up for the rampant mediocrity of Sevierville and for the eye-scourge of Pigeon Forge. It was chock full of shops that sold useless devices, weapons, ridiculous souvenirs, all the shit that I find so entertaining about tourist destinations (Magnet World was my favorite purveyor of unnecessary crap...). What set it apart, though, was its cleanliness and character. The city maintains a kind of charm that many other cities would lose the second that a Mystery Mansion or an Old Time Photo is built. It's a quaint, comfortable city filled to the brim with ridiculous schlock, but it works. It may, in fact, be enhanced by the schlock. It makes people watching outrageously fun. The plethora of fried foods and candy shops made it even more so. It's a city with such an extreme amount of tourist bullshit that it's impossible to not find something, or someone, to laugh at while meandering the well-maintained and historic main strip. (I highly recommend playing "count the FUPAs" if you get even the slightest bit bored there. The number we saw was staggering.)

The proximity to Smoky Mountain National Park attracted a different, more acceptable (if less entertaining) kind of tourist. These, by and large, went unnoticed, by me at least, until they were encountered on a trail. They are a fairly unremarkable, FUPA-less sort, and will not be discussed further than saying that they basically cancelled out the flashier tourists, making Gatlinburg infinitely less horrible for me than Pigeon Forge.

I'm tired of writing now. I'll leave my encounters with trails and woods, mountains and ice, 4.0 Christians and hide and seek for tomorrow, I suppose.

On that note, keep in mind that the experiences I will describe speak volumes more about the trip than the prior paragraphs describing the place in general...

In layman's terms, some funny shit happened...