Road Trip to Pigeon Forge and Beyond

We're just back from a 3-day road trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, through Pigeon Forge, where there was a huge car show on the main drag. I hardly know what to say about this, except that it is a fairly stunning experience to literally crawl through town in a traffic jam that lasts for hours, past hundreds of cars with their hoods up in the parking lots, their owners sitting on lawn chairs, just chatting and drinking sodas and watching the traffic inch past.

I saw a lot of orange vehicles and was reminded of the time when Jack was small when we used to play "Orange Car!" and get extra points for spotting one; they were so unusual. But not in Tennessee.

If I were more into cars, and wanted to buy a vintage vehicle of some kind, especially an orange car, then Pigeon Forge would be the place for me. As it was, I was more or less aghast, thinking about the impact of all of those vehicles and people on the surrounding environment.

Here's a video from YouTube (also at this link), with music by Throttlerod, "Hell and High Water," that gives you a sense of the Pigeon Forge Car Show. It was posted by Justin, self-confessed car addict, 20-year old store clerk at Kroger who also loves drawing pictures of cars. (He has posted a few videos of his car drawings, too.) The images in the video must have been taken near the beginning of the show (which ends on Tuesday), as they don't really show how absolutely jam-packed everything is there on the main drag of Pigeon Forge (and for miles and miles at each edge of town).

Yup, that's where we were. Yee gads, and yeehaw! It only takes a bit more than 4 minutes to watch the video, but it took as long as 4 hours (or more) to inch through Pigeon Forge the past few days.