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Despite having maps in our pockets and good map display boards around the park we weren't sure where to find ourselves or find specific rides at first. Granted, our first minutes at Dollywood were spent drinking in something cool and drinking in the scenery.
The first ride we actually got to was the Village Carousel, which has a nice grand-looking building housing your basic Chance fiberglass carousel. The ride may be identical to carousels in a lot of places (including Michigan's Adventure, Dorney Park, and Waldameer), but it is kept in very good shape, and the painting particularly was in fantastic shape. Much more subtle painting on, like, the fur and the saddle blankets of the rides, and it seemed to me more elaborate miniature paintings where those fit onto the animals. (Wikipedia tells me they used to have a 1924 Dentzel carousel, but replaced it in the late 90s, for reasons they don't think worth explaining.)
This part was in an area of the park called The Village, something themed to your average little Appalachian town. It's also where the narrow-gauge railroad that was the original attraction, the one Dollywood formed around, starts from. There's also a nice-looking little Village Library that promised activities that seemed kid-oriented. We didn't go in, trusting that if we had time we'd get to some of the indoor exhibitions rather than rides. We ended up not actually having time for this, because the searing heat meant everything we did needed some buffer time before and after, but I mention to emphasize how much there is at the park even if you don't go onto, or consider going onto, any rides.
In the search for roller coasters we followed a path downhill that took us to the County Fair section. This is themed around just what you'd think, with rides such as you might see at a county fair, including a Scrambler, swing rides, a lot of kiddie rides. And seemed to be the place to get cotton candy and extremely fairground food like that. Good to know.
Where we finally found a roller coaster (it wasn't that long) was the adjacent Jukebox Junction, which has a theme of ... like, those Self-Aware Diners that are overly Chrome and 50s Styling and figures of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and all? Imagine that but spilled out to a fake town, complete with faux streets (with traffic lanes and no-passing zones and all) and imitation car dealerships and everything.
The roller coaster in this area is Lightning Rod, which sounds like something with a storm theme, right? Especially given that another coaster at Dollywood is named Thunderhead, and they used to have a coaster named Thunder Express. Nope; it's a hot rod-themed ride. It's a wooden coaster built by Rocky Mountain Construction, an outfit that made its name renovating wooden coasters into steel coasters that, because of the differences between wood and steel track, can include things like spirals and loops and stuff. But Lightning Rod wasn't a conversion; it was created from scratch as a wooden-structure coaster with RMC's track. It's a weird design.
Its entrance is made to look like an Old Timey gas station, the sort with lollipop-model gas pumps outside. To our delight there was no line and we just marched right on through, making an embarrassing mistake along the way.
So it turns out that Dollywood, like most modern parks, has a line-cutting wristband option. We blazed right on past the turnoff there, because we didn't recognize where the queue for Us Normal People started and where the Line-Cutters Queue started. We had no idea, since among other things we didn't see anyone else until we got up to the launch platform and the ride operator there asked if we had the fast lane or whatever they call it. No, not at all. But since there was nobody waiting --- as he explained the situation to us a handful of people did come up to the Normal People Queue --- it was all right, it was just something we should be aware of later.
Turns out that there is a split and it's marked, but in signs that I think look too much like the regular background details you'd expect to see in a gas station, so they didn't get my attention. Also, as you come in from outside, the line-cutters just keep walking straight ahead while everyone else is supposed to turn to the left, and I claim that's bad design. ``Walk straight ahead'' is the obvious default and if that's not right you need to make it hard to do by accident. But, adequately informed, we were ready to not make this mistake in the future. Next time we rode this coaster, I started making the same mistake.
Lightning Rod is a fun one, though, as all the RMC coasters are. It climbs a mountain beside the park, so it has the thrill of great climbs and drops while staying usually close to the ground, a thing that heightens the excitement of any action. It's got a lot of the feel of a ride like Steel Vengeance --- not as long as that, as Cedar Point's ride had an exceptionally long ride by choice --- but in that spirit of the ride eager to throw you out of the train and held back by the restraints. The one curious thing, and it was our ride the next day before I was sure of this, is that it didn't actually ever roll you over the whole way. You twisted to the side and rode horizontally, or came close to being upside-down, but you never rotated the whole way over. I'm not sure why they eschewed the thing that makes these steel-track wood-body coasters distinct; was it a design constraint of the terrain they were on, or did management not want to scare riders off with loops or spirals?
It's possible there've been changes because of post-construction issues. The ride originally had an induction motor, but in 2021 replaced that with a chain lift hill, like you expect from any roller coaster. It also used to use RMC's ``Topper Track'', which is a thingy where the thingy and it's more like traditional wooden track than not. But in 2021 that was also replaced with RMC's ``I-Box Track'', which is a different thingy where the different thingy and it's distinct enough that trade publication Amusement Today reclassified the ride from a wooden to a steel coaster, and coaster-count.com treats the pre-2021 and the post-2021 Lightning Rods as different credits.
Still, the important things this time around. We got on, the ride was great, and there was no line. Not just none to speak of; we walked on to one of the park's big rides. Great start to things.
Going here to close off our Friday-at-Halloweekends pictures. Hope you like seeing things by night!
Those pictures from the Magnum XL 200 queue were leading somewhere, and it's here, the Mangum XL 200 ride. It hasn't changed much despite the renovation of the areas around it, and it remains a ride with incredible capacity so even on high-volume weekends like Halloweekends the lines are often short.
Troika, seen in flight. Makes for some good streaks of light here.
I don't think these are streaks showing this to be incandescent rather than LED bulbs (which flicker at 60 Hz and so can produce these dotty strings of light). I believe I took this using a low-light mode that averages together a string of pictures to make a respectable exposure. (The metadata says this was a 1/30 second exposure on simulated ISO 400 at f/2.8, so we can make suppositions.)
Here's the Troika rising up to the Moon!
Our last ride for the night was Blue Streaks, or as its seasonal renaming has it, Boo Streak. Note the string of bedsheet ghosts to on the station.
And for a last picture of the night, the twisting ribbon of Raptor as seen from outside Blue/Boo Streak. Nice, isn't it?
Trivia: In the time of Charlemagne, saint's days were called ``birthdays'' -- genethlios or natalis --- though the term meant more that they were commemorations, drawing from a pagan Roman custom of celebrating deified rulers on a particular day. These days were, typically, the day of a saint's martyrdom. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 35: Hooray For Ourside, You!! or If They Want Rooters, Why Take the Pig Out of the Pigskin?, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
