Destination: Horror!

Bryan, Kristin, and I were supposed to go on an entirely different trip today. I had planned out a whole adventure in North Carolina, but it turns out that the main place I wanted to go to operates on a seasonal schedule, and won't be open again until the spring. Somehow this didn't come up in my planning, and after I apologized profusely earlier in the week Bryan decided that he would pick us up anyway and would drive toward Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and just stop wherever we saw something interesting.

Interesting for Bryan and interesting for Kristin and I are two different things, as Bryan had his eyes on the majectic beauty of the Smokies, and Kristin and I had our eyes on something directly in front of them:



The World's Largest "As Seen on TV Store", which we expected to be a magical wonderland of Snuggies and giant cupcake cake pans and juicers and choppers and Sham-wows. We did see all of those things inside the store, but we saw so many other, more terrible things, and eventually just kind of fled.

Things started going downhill as soon as we walked in, when we were confronted in the vestibule by a Santa statue.

"He's sort of creepy," Kristin said, and I immediately noticed why.

"Where's his mouth?"

"Let me look."



He didn't have one. There was a lot of beard hair, and underneath a blank, featureless chin. What kind of biological nightmare produces a human being with no mouth?

Probably the same kind that produces flying killer whales:



I've never seen one of those on TV, by the way, but that seems to be a theme at the World's Largest "As Seen on TV" store. In between the food dehydrators and jugs of C.L.R., you see things like this:



I've never seen a commercial for the Bun and Thigh Doer. I realize the name "Thighmaster" is already taken, but the best word the marketing department could come up with instead was "doer"? Usually when someone around me mentions doing someone's buns (like the ones drawn on the seat around the word "bun") they mean a whole other form of exercise. After looking at it, I wasn't really sure what it was supposed to do to your buns and thighs, and there was no one around to ask besides the Obamas:



The "As Seen on TV" store, for unknown reasons, carries a large number of cardboard celebrity standups, and displays them all over the store. Jesus was hanging out in men's t-shirts, Glinda the Good Witch hovered over the discount books, Chris Pine as Captain Kirk watched over a display of discount coffee mugs, and John Wayne looked vaguely shocked at being there:



There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the placement of the standups. If I was running the store, for example, I'd have Jesus over by the display of religious license plate tags:



On the other hand, it's possible that they didn't want it to appear that Jesus condones unauthorized use of licensed logos:



For shame, "As Seen on TV" store.

Then again, what's a little infringement when you're peddling open racism? Since I've moved to Tennessee I've heard more than once that the Confederate flag:



is a symbol of proud heritage that I, as a liberal Yankee, can't really understand and that it has nothing to do with racism, but how else do you explain this?



Not only are the makers not ashamed to print and sell this, but they're actually proud:



Right about then is when we decided we'd seen enough, and left the store. Not having a real destination in mind, we drove through to Gatlinburg, walked around, and saw things that were just odd and bizarre, rather than openly offensive.

Wait, day-glo plastic Buddhas might be offensive:



I'm not really sure what the rules are for Buddhism.

Caramel apples, on the other hand, are never offensive:



Neither is taffy:



I was going to say that neither is bacon, but the bacon flavored lip balm leaves me uncertain:



Could this finally be a way in which bacon is not wonderful? Or would tasting someone's bacon-flavored lips lead to the kind of makeout session that Aaron Samuels and Regina George enjoyed in "Mean Girls" after he discovered that her face smelled like peppermint? Until someone tries it, the bacon balm is simultaneously wonderful and horrible, a Schrodinger's tube of lip balm waiting to be revealed. It's a question for greater minds than mine to ponder.

There's no question, on the other hand, that chum flavored candy has to be disgusting:



Almost as disgusting as the grammar on the side of the buffet we ate at:



No one who works there has ever noticed this? Do they not have schools in Gatlinburg, or did they tear them down to build a school-themed minigolf instead?

Either way, it was a fun day, even if I do feel like a little bit more of a hillbilly every time I visit:

Staycation Day 1: See Beautiful Gatlinburg (And All Of Its Beautiful Crap)!

It's spring break at school this week, so I took today and tomorrow off to give myself a four day weekend. Since I won't be off again until June (unless a holiday pops up in there; are we off for Memorial Day?) I decide that I'm going to pack a a whole bunch of stuff into these four days, but I'm going to stick close to home to save money. In short, I am on staycation.

Staycation kicked off last night, when Jeannie and family invited me to go to dinner with them at Chili's. I won't go into excessive detail, except to say that dinner reminded me that I should never have children and that I should have been more faithful to my New Year's resolution to leave the area when Jeannie's kid starts crying. Here he is with his kid's meal dinner, minutes before the explosion:



Less than ten minutes later Jeannie was walking around the parking lot with him and we were getting everything packed into to-go boxes.

Despite the poor beginning, I maintained a freakishly high level of excitement for "Staycation '09: Spring Break Joelapalooza!", because my plan for today was to drive down to Gatlinburg, to go to the Aquarium of the Smokies and to just soak up the town. While I've driven through Gatlinburg a number of times, I've never actually gotten out of the car there. Instead, I've spent a lot of time in Pigeon Forge, the incredibly tacky tiny Vegas five miles down the road. Pigeon Forge is on my "places to visit" list, but I know I would need to do an overnight trip to see everything and squeeze in a couple of shows. Gatlinburg, on the other hand, can be done in a day, because it's like Pigeon Forge concentrated.

Gatlinburg, unlike Pigeon Forge, is inside the boundaries of the beautiful Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This means that instead of building Dollywood's and Christmas Towns and outlet malls, Gatlinburg has had to do the best they can with limited space, and they've done their best to make it as touristy as possible. It's ten stoplights worth of sheer tourist trap awful, and it's wonderful! I walked around town all day with a huge dopey grin on my face, because there was something terrible and wonderful everywhere I looked. The whole town, with its cheap hotels and cabin rentals and resorts, is designed to separate you from your money.

In short, Gatlinburg is full of crap, both figurative, like this dismembered Marilyn Monroe jewelry holder:



or this racy sign with its strategically placed price tag:



and literal crap, like this barrel of crap:



It may be the best crap in town, and you may be able to have it gift wrapped, but crap is still crap.

The businesses in town fall into several types. They stick in your mind because nothing in town is unique. If you see a candy store or a candle shop, you can spot at least two other candy stores or candle shops from where you're standing. One of the main types, not surprising, is the gift shop. They come in "tacky", "odd":



and "Southern stereotype":



If they don't have what you like at the gift shops, you can always just get something airbrushed onto a t-shirt:



I passed sixteen airbrushing stores, and there were probably others that I didn't see. Not only can you get any possible design, but they cater to tourists of every size:



I can't even form a mental picture of how large an adult 7 XL shirt must be. I wanted to go in and unfold one, but didn't think they would let me. They also have preprinted, non-airbrushed t-shirts, and the odd cultural mixing of Bible Belt and Redneck Stereotype leads to some hilarious displays:



Yes, if there's one thing Christian girls love, it's t-shirts with jokes about rutting.

Another ubiquitous business is the Old Tyme Photo studio. I took no photos of these, but I passed at least seven, and noticed on the way out of town that one manages to stand out by being a combination Old Tyme Photo studio and Wedding Chapel.

The third major type of business, the mini golf course, has also diversified itself. There's Jungle Golf, Dinosaur Golf, Adventure Golf, themeless mini-golf:



which manages to stand out from the others by having nothing special, Circus Golf, Blacklight Golf:



and several other varieties. Just down the road in Pigeon Forge, they also have Farm Golf, where you golf around cows. It makes me oddly homesick for upstate New York. You could spend all day in Gatlinburg playing minigolf, and it would be like a strange, tacky PGA tour.

The main thing that Gatlinburg is famous for, though, according to everyone around here, is pancakes.



There are pancake houses, pancake cabins, pancake buffets, pancake pits, and this, the most famous:



The Pancake Pantry is the most famous pancake restaurant in Gatlinburg, but I didn't eat there because there was a huge line, all day long. Instead, since I was out being a tourist, I ate somewhere super touristy:



I had the twisted mac and cheese:



It was good, but not spicy like the waitress warned me it would be. This was the first Hard Rock I've been inside in about five years, and nothing has changed. That's probably why tourists like them so much.

The other thing tourists like, at least in Gatlinburg, is the Ripley's family of attractions. They have a "Believe It Or Not!" museum, a "Mirror Maze", a haunted house adventure, a "Moving Theater":



and the Aquarium of the Smokies, the purpose of my trip:



At the aquarium I learned that a lot of people don't know how to turn the flash on their digital camera off and like to complain about it (my camera came with instructions, but I guess theirs didn't), that a lot of children run off even when their parents repeatedly say their name but don't actually chase them or try to physically restrain them, and that they might as well not put up those "don't tap the glass" signs because no one is going to tell their kids to stop doing it.

I also took a lot of pictures:

















As always, more photos are on my flickr page.