Mom's Birthday Weekend: Mountains of Fun

Pumpkins and funnel cakes and Dollywood, oh my! We just unloaded the car and unpacked from a weekend in the Smoky Mountains, celebrating my mom's birthday (say it with me now, Happy Birthday, Susan). This time of year is the perfect time to head to the mountains and enjoy the changing leaves, all the fall decorations, and some quality family time at Dolly Parton's theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It has become an annual tradition for mom's birthday that we look forward to each year.

We met Friday for lunch in downtown Gatlinburg, and enjoyed the cool fall weather walking around the tourist-packed downtown and seeing the sights. Naturally, we brought our dogs and their strollers, and they lapped up all the attention they were getting from passers-by. It was peak tourist season and crazy crowded, so we prioritized: after stopping for fudge and taffy at the Smoky Mountain Candy Kitchen, we headed out of town and checked into our cabin for the weekend.

The dogs, relaxing in their strollers outside the Smoky Mountain Candy Kitchen.

Our home for the weekend.

Friday night, we ate apple fritters and comfort food to our heart's content at the Applewood Farmhouse, and then headed to indulge in our guilty tourist trap pleasure at the Titanic Museum. If you have ever driven by this attraction, how can you resist going inside? The building is a half scale replica of the Titanic ship!

The exterior of the Titanic Museum. We are powerless to resist a gimmick.

When you enter the museum, you each given a boarding pass with a real passenger's name and biographical information. You see where on the ship they would have stayed, and at the end of the tour you find out if your passenger survived or not. I was less than thrilled when I got a third class passenger, but pleasantly surprised when I saw her name on the survivor's wall (only 26% of third class passengers made it off the ship).

My boarding pass from the Titanic Museum. I made it!

Clint, using a shovel weighted to give you the feel of what it would have been like to shovel coal into the furnace of the ship. It was so heavy!

To access the second story of the museum, we got to walk up an exact replica of the ship's grand staircase, recreated from the original blueprints.

We got to see plates and silver from on board the ship, as well as original life jackets worn by surviving passengers. There is even part of the exhibit where you can walk out on a deck and feel water chilled the temperature of the ocean that evening--28 degrees! One of our most favorite parts was a Lego replica of the Titanic built by a 10-year old autistic boy; it is 26 feet long and five feet high. That's a lot of Legos!

The massive Lego ship built by a 10-year old. It was astonishing.

I promise to move on from the Titanic Museum, but let me just also add that we closed the place down and bought Christmas ornaments at the gift shop, if that gives you any idea of how much we enjoyed our experience. We headed back to the coziness of our cabin to a box of Gigi's cupcakes for the birthday girl, and to get a good night's sleep in preparation for a full day of Dollywood the next day.

If you've never been to Dollywood, I can only describe it as the cleanest, friendliest, most family friendly theme park I've ever visited. Not only do we love the rides (and the food), each fall they go over-the-top with their LumiNights festival with thousands of carved and illuminated pumpkins. We got to the park around 10:30 Saturday morning, and were some of the last to leave when it closed at 9:00 p.m. that night (okay, we did take a couple of breaks to go back to the cabin and check on the dogs, but still). I think it's safe to say we didn't miss a thing.

Dollywood has a section that looks just like a 1950s town.
After lunch at Red's Diner, I dared Mom to climb on the hood of the police car parked outside.
Old enough to know better, still too young to care.

A rainy afternoon in Dollywood is still a pretty good way to spend an afternoon.

Hooray for Dollywood!

A pumpkin spice funnel cake, with caramel sauce and brown sugar pecans.

We never met a seasonal, limited time product we didn't want to try.
This was even better than it looks.

I hope your weekend was half as much fun as ours.

Even though she never ages a day, I want to wish my mom a very happy birthday and year ahead. She is the hostess with the most, always an entertainer, a firm believer in eating dessert first, and the glue that keeps our family together. Wishing you many more, Mom! xoxo