Dollywood

Saturday we packed up the car, made a pit stop to grab my mom, and headed to TN towards Dollywood. It’s been on my list for a long time and Wyatt is finally tall enough to ride most of the rides. In fact, at 42″, he can ride all but the tallest rollercoasters in the park. 

The weather was next to perfect: neither too hot to be enjoyable nor too cold to want to go on the water rides. We arrived right as the gates were opening.

The park is in a big circle and we headed clockwise to see what kind of trouble we could find. I love rollercoasters, but the hubby and my mom are less enthusiastic so I was prepared to skip most things and just enjoy what Wyatt could ride. 

The park itself is really nice. Everything was sparkling clean and the employees were really nice and friendly. Wyatt was in a hard in between stage: too big to enjoy the little kiddie rides and while tall enough to ride most of the big rollercoasters he was too little to enjoy them. Even with that we found plenty to do. 

The park is broken into sections and each was well decorated. I enjoyed the ambience of each although the 1950s styled section was my favorite. If I could live in any other era it would be the 50s with the sock hops, wonderful music, cool cars and relative prosperity. I was really good at taking pictures in the first section we hit, but after that the phone was placed in protection from water as we did a lot of water rides in the heat of the afternoon. Then I forgot all about it. 

We missed out on the entire central aspect of the park and I think Wyatt would have found plenty to do there, but it was getting late and everyone was tired and ready to leave. 

The day was really enjoyable. We rode plenty of rides with Wyatts favorite being the raft water ride although he was a bit too small to get much of the water spray.

There would only be two complaints I would raise about the park. First, the food was ridiculously expensive. It was bad enough to shell out $67 per ticket but all the lunches were $11 a pop. For chicken nuggets. A regular sized hot dog was $6! For a hot dog! I hate feeling ripped off. Second, the entrances to the rides were really difficult to find. We ended up waking around the outside of many rides just trying to figure out where to enter. 

I’d love to go back. Everyone was whooped when we left and Sunday was spent recuperating at home. Wyatt played play dough for a solid 8 hours. Next time I hope to get him on more rides as I was a bit sad walking past some of the coasters and not being able to go on. Dusty and I snuck away one time to ride the Mystery Mine coaster while my Mom took Wyatt on a different one, but other than that we stuck together. 

Having been to Disney, Cedar Park, Six Flags in Ohio and Kennywood I’d say in comparison this one is like a mini Disney with all the scenery and then beautifully built rides. It wasn’t just steel coaster after steel coaster. There were a few really big steel coasters to go on for adrenaline junkies but most of the rides were more toned down and fun. Much more my style. I would recommend it for anyone in the area.