Driving down the Parkway in Pigeon Forge is not like curling up with a good book. It's not like mindfulness meditation. It's not like Vivaldi or cool jazz. Parts of it are like "Surfer Bird" by the Trashmen, but "Surfer Bird" makes a more compelling, unified statement.
The Parkway takes bad taste and then filters out the intelligence. It's more like Soupy Sales than Jerry Lewis, Freddie and the Dreamers than Herman's Hermits, a chicken with its head cut off than a penguin. Gatlinburg is just as tacky, but is nestled charmingly in the mountains. The Parkway in Pigeon Forge is a relentless, garish strip, an eternal traffic jam, with no redeeming geography.
It aspires more to the grand gesture than it used to. As you enter the Endless Drag from the north you now catch glimpses of enormous commercial developments on your left, big concrete entertainment venues the size of Lenin's Tomb with exotic names ("Cirque de Chine"), and blocks and blocks of brand-new pastel-colored shops.
Before you know it, though, you are in the midst of the flying pigs, looming plastic dinosaurs, and hideously grinning sharks that line the Parkway proper. A lot of new stuff has popped up here as well since my last visit (1987). Adventure Quest's castle looks as if it was built with Legos, and I like the upside-down WonderWorks building. You can do it all in Pigeon Forge—drive 40-mile-an-hour go-carts, do indoor skydiving, get married at more than one site, play miniature golf at what seems like dozens.
You can even buy groceries.
Penetrate far enough into garishness and you start running into artifacts of vacations past—old-time souvenir shops, fudge and funnel cake shops, and stores after store selling products "As Seen on TV."
That's the section of the Parkway where the Pigeon Forge Food Club sits, right before Dollywood, between the Sevier County Bank and Pigeon Forge Traders Gift Shop (offering knives, swimwear, leather, plastic bears, and huge Support Our Troops lawn sculpture).
Like the surrounding stores, the Food City is a period piece. Its logo is displayed on a broad band of 1962-vintage corrugated plastic that runs the length of the store. Inside the door is a full rack of tourist brochures and three grab-the-prize-with-the-pinchers arcade games. The bargain products on the wall as you enter feature charcoal, fire starters, cook-out implements, and camping supplies.
There are similar displays at least two other places in the store, as well as bins of bargain rods and reels, swim gear, ice coolers, and a display of board games for killing time by the campfire. Along with the outdoors products there is also a definite party theme at work here, with a well-stocked specialty beer section and hard coolers like Smirnoff Ice Green Apple Bite and Mike's Hard Pomegranate Lemonade.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Pigeon Forge Food City, though, is how unremarkable it is. Outside the store it's Female Elvis Mud Wrestling, inside it's a quiet store in the country. You get the impression that aside from the tourists from Michigan there are plenty of regular people living in the surrounding hills who come into the Food City to stock their cabinets and refrigerators.
Prices are moderate. The store is large with rather low ceilings, but clean and pleasant with the usual amenities, reasonable produce and meat departments, attractive deli and bakery, and an operating pharmacy.
Where's a guy supposed to get a tattoo? Down the Parkway at American Rebel Tattoos Studio. Can I experience a 65-mile-an-hour hurricane here? No, visit WonderWork's Hurricane Hole simulator. Have you got anything on the dawn of Creation? No, but you can check it out onstage at the Biblical epic The Miracle. How about world-famous racing pigs? Go to Dixie Stampede.
But where are the people with the extra eyeballs that I saw on the billboard driving down here?
I'm sorry, sir, our shoppers all have just one per socket. Would you care for some grapes?
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