Dollywood's origins are in a narrow-gauge railroad that went up a mountain and back down. The park has grown around that and so is, in the main, a ring. There are a couple branches hanging off of that ring, like some aromatic hydrocarbon. The Village and the County Fair and Jukebox Junction were one of those side branches. All the roller coasters besides Lightning Rod were elsewhere. And we figured the roller coasters were the thing to target in our four-hour (or whatever it was) day, since the lines were short today and who knew what they'd be like the next day?
So we went, roughly clockwise along the main loop, finding Thunderhead, the big wooden coaster and this is a wooden coaster, no RMC track involved. Who did build this 2004 wooden coaster, you may wonder, if you don't know there's basically one company at any time that builds wooden roller coasters and every decade or two it goes bankrupt and the survivors form a new company? The giveaway was in the big, banked, curving drop after the lift hill. That's so much a Great Coasters International thing it's not even necessary to ride the heavily-banked turns with bunny hops in them to identify the ride. Once more it was a walk-on, although it was harder to be sure we weren't accidentally using the Line Cutters Queue. The signs were designed for a day when any of the queue gates would be opened up and you'd be expected to walk back and forth in the shade of the coaster a while. Instead we'd just walk right up and pick a row.
This was, as the manufacturer's name promises, a great coaster. At 100 feet tall it's about as big as you can make a wooden coaster without the size starting to work against it; it's got the airtime and the sideways moves that make the modern generation of junior wooden coasters so great. It's hard to pick a best coaster of Dollywood, but even if not for the bonus any wooden coaster gets in our esteem, this would be the strong pick.
In the shadow of Thunderhead is a tiny coaster called the Whistle Punk Chaser. This is about as park-generic a ride as the cosaters at Dollywood get; there are coasters of the same model at several Legolands and at Storybook Land in --- no, not that one --- Aberdeen, South Dakota. But the name tells you something about the ride. The Whistle Punk is a lumberjack who runs the logging locomotive, and oversees the movement of logs through the camp. This is explained in a sign at the entrance to the ride, and it even includes a page of whistle signals that might even be legitimate, I don't know. The ride is built around a mock(?) locomotive engine, labelled Willy's Whistles, and the area decorated with crates and logging tools to give that logging-camp look.
I mention this to give an idea what the theming is like at Dollywood. The ride would be an okay thing that kids afraid of the big coasters would ride without anything but the name, or even a generic name like Family Coaster or its Legoland name, Dragon's Apprentice. But it's given a theme, something that plausibly connects to the Great Smokey Mountains of the vicinity, and it commits to that. It's more work put into the presentation than the park strictly needs, but having that makes the experience better, and is part of what makes for good, lasting memories of a park that overwhelms in good ways.
The ride did not chew up our knees and spit them out. So it has that going for it too.
Outside the Mystery Mine --- a ride ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had heard exciting things about, and that was renovated heavily enough in the 2020-21 offseason that coaster-count.com considers it a new ride and the Roller Coaster Database despairs of an accurate length figure --- was another delight. This was a vulture animatronic that would every few minutes wake up and do a couple minutes of schtick. The ride itself is fun, a Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter much like Untamed at Canobie Lake Park, Impulse at Knoebels, or Hydrus at Casino Pier, with the most prominent element being the lift hills (plural) that go straight up, riders on their back hoping their keys don't fall out of their pockets. Its advantage on the all-outdoor counterparts is, besides a more complicated path, that it goes partway through the Mystery Mine building, with dark ride-style theming and stunts before it goes outside. We were fortunate to get front-seat rides each time we rode, so we got the even better views of, for example, the tower ``collapsing'' on the TV screen above our heads during a lift hill.
Also outside the Mystery Mine was a gift shop that had something we knew had to be there. This was Dollywood fanny packs. bunnyhugger's preferred choice of fanny pack was this nice rainbow-themed one that she discovered the day we set out on this trip had a weird, large ink stain somehow. She'd reverted to a university fanny pack she didn't like but that was present and un-stained, but was on the lookout for one that would be more fun. And here at a gift stand next to Mystery Mine, was the one that --- she would not take home. But now she knew there were Dollywood-themed fanny packs she'd be on the lookout. And she would find one she did buy, with a Great Smokey Mountains theme, near one of the other coasters. Between this and another fanny pack she had ordered weeks before, but that didn't arrive until after we got home, she's got a well-accessorized place to keep all the stuff that otherwise would be squished into a wristlet or left in my cargo pockets or the car. Short but extremely successful day and it's not over yet.
We're now up to Saturday, and the median of our Halloweekends trip last year. And you know what Saturday on Halloweekends means? That's right, it's time for pictures of ...
The Merry-Go-Round Museum! Or maybe the Scary-Go-Round Museum since as you see they went and haunted the place up for this year. Also note the pack of kids in costumes, that I believe were leaving as I don't seem to have any pictures of kids in costumes inside the museum. We'll see.
Entrance hall. Not only have they got packs of chariots but now there's fake gravestones adding pleasant enough puns to things.
Also who isn't going to like this chariot of the two gryphons playing together, or maybe doing what birds do instead of kissing?
More chariot sides, alongside fake gravestones that to some extent blend in to scenes that already had, you know, heraldic and supernatural and paranormal figures depicted alongside the allegories and occasional mermaid angels.
Back into the main room now. You can see the old banner for the C W Parker factory and also the museum's Brass Ring arm. They don't use it, but they have it to show people how the thing worked.
Framed, worn list of carousels still doing the ring game. At the time of this photograph we'd been to three of them. As that lead implies, there's a story to come about one of these rides ...
Trivia: The first all-aluminum beer can was promoted by the Hawaii Brewing Company in 1958 as ``the shiney steiny''. Source: The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 36: Boogerman, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. No, I checked, that's the title. Popeye goes to become a Pro Wrestler manager.
