July 18 - Dollywood
Dollywood is in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and they're celebrating their 35th Anniversary. It's the sister park to Silver Dollar City, which is celebrating its 60th Anniversary. Much like with
Disneyland / Disney World, it's hard to talk about one park without talking about the other. Dollywood opened as Silver Dollar City, Tennessee before Dolly Parton came into the mix. Their respective cities share many of the same stage shows and other attractions. The parks share many of the same rides, but they also have rides that are very similar as they're built by the same manufacturers, but they're very different rides.
For example, they both have RMCs. Dollywood has Lightning Rod which is a wooden launch coaster that hold's the distinction for world's fastest at 73 mph. It's freaking nuts. Silver Dollar City has Outlaw Run which is a wooden roller coaster is 3 inversions.
I came into this wanting to give a glowing review of Dollywood. I've heard nothing but good things about the park and I love Silver Dollar City, however, that was not my experience.
Before I begin, I will say that my day started out bad, but ended really good. Overall, I had a good day, but going to Dollywood right now is not something I recommend.
Of the parks I've been to so far (my local Six Flags and Silver Dollar City), Dollywood by far did the worst in terms of social distancing, mask enforcement and sanitation. There's only so much Dollywood can do, a lot of it depends on the guests to follow the rules.
People were pretty compliant with the masks in walkways, but it wasn't perfect. What Dollywood did really well was have water washing stations everywhere and require you to sanitize your hand before going on any ride. Seriously, they would not let you on if you didn't sanitize. They were also giving out free face masks to people who lost their mask on a ride or if it broke.
The standard ques were an absolute disaster. I don't know why, but for whatever reason people weren't really adhering to the mask rule in the ques and distancing was pretty spotty. When the first ride posted a 45 minute wait, I got in and promptly left. I purchased their version of a paid Fast Pass (which was just a lanyard) which gave you access to a line skip thing. One version gave you 10 skips, while the other version gave you unlimited. Obviously I went with Unlimited and it completely saved my day.
Using their Time Saver Unlimited thing, I was able to avoid the nightmare ques entirely and ride pretty much every ride in the park that day. With the exception of a few of the little little kid rides, I rode everything and rode the rollercoasters multiple times. Rides wise, it was a pretty good day.
Food wise, it wasn't great. I saw this really cute Drive-In Burger place and got a Bacon Hamburger, Fries and a Vanilla Shake. The fries were good, the bacon was nice, the bun was good, but the patty was bland and dry. The shake was awesome! For dinner, I had a cheese pizza, which tasted like a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, again not great. Silver Dollar City has this really good fired pizza with choose your own toppings, so coming from that it was very disappointing.
I did get a souvenir cup so I could get free drinks throughout the day. They filled the first one up with the soda of my choice and from there on they would either give me a cup of soda or a can of soda depending on the location. I kind of wish they had a wrist band or something where they would just give me my soda throughout the day and let me pick up the mug on the way out, but other than that it worked out great.
It was a very hot day, so people starting tapping out by 2pm. By 5 the park was mostly empty and by 8 pm I pretty much had the park to myself. If this was my local park, I'd go after 5:30 and have a great experience every time.
They have a pretty nice selection of rides and roller coasters. However, their Arrow Coaster, Tennessee Tornado, really hurt my knees. The first time I thought it was a fluke, rode it a second time and it hurt even worse. It's still a little sore a few days later. Some of their indoor stuff like the Dolly Parton Museum and Butterfly House was closed due to COVID. They had live entertainment, but it was all outdoors. It was pretty fun to just wonder on to shows. The layout is basically a circle, but if you don't know where you're going you can easily miss something. I had to backtrack to ride one of the roller coasters that I missed.
The park is really pretty. The landscaping is really nice and everything has a nice coat of paint. The bathrooms are new and clean and I really enjoyed all of the theming that they did.
One really nice surprise at the end of the night was the fireworks. I knew I wasn't getting any at Disney, so I was pretty surprised that they announced fireworks on the loud speakers 30 minutes before close.
Overall, I had a pretty good day. I would certainly visit Dollywood again in the future, but it's definitely not a park that I could recommend during all of this pandemic stuff due to the issues I had in the first hour.
I decided that I wanted to get back on the road, which was probably ill advised. I got an additional hour and a half done before I had to find a hotel. I ended up at an ok place, not great at all. I paid more than I felt it was worth, but I learned a valuable lesson. Never book a hotel when you're tired and never book a hotel that's not on the app.
