Pigeon Forge, Tennessee – Part 3

Photo above is the Alcatraz East Crime museum in Pigeon Forge. It was a very interesting place with lots of exhibits and very well done. I know some people call these Tourist Traps and maybe they are but we always enjoy places like this, although some can be a bit pricey. Years ago, I toured Alcatraz Penitentiary in San Francisco, and when Clint and I went to San Francisco in 2019 we tried to go again but you had to buy tickets months in advance so no luck for us!

  • Alcatraz
  • Lots of different rooms
  • Always an interesting topic
  • Al Capone used to hide his liquor in an underground cave in Moose Jaw, Manitoba Canada
  • Ted Bundy’s vehicle
  • Stylin’

One place we stopped at was Buc-ees because people we met last year on one of our trips said we had to go to Buc-cees! I don’t know why, it was just a huge convenience store and so after our walk through, we left, having bought nothing. Buc-cees photo below

We went to a couple of breweries during our stay in Pigeon Forge and area. Two we liked were Iron Forge Brewery where I had a delicious hummus and vegetable plate and we also went to Gatlinburg Brewery where we shared a tasty pizza and of course beer at both spots.

  • Iron Forge Brewery
  • Gatlinburg Brewery

We also stopped for breakfast one morning at Mel’s Diner, really cool retro place and then on to Sevierville to see the Dolly Parton statue.

  • Mel’s Diner
  • Dolly Parton statue, taken out the car window as we drove past…no parking

We did drive to other towns/cities close by to see what they had as well as spending more time driving through the Smoky Mountains National Park.

We went to a restaurant or two and tried the Jurassic Park boat ride (we are children at heart) and a few other things but then it was time to go after being there 5 days.

So off to Sutton, West Virginia for one night and then Niagara Falls, Canada for one night and then home. Our 5 week adventure through Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee done!

It was a great trip and there are still a few other States we haven’t been to that hopefully we will get to one day.

Thanks for reading. Next stop…………..Portugal and Spain where we spent a few weeks in September/October 2023.

10 thoughts on “Pigeon Forge, Tennessee – Part 3”

  4. I enjoyed this post too. Tennessee was very interesting, especially Pigeon Forge. I just spent quite a long time looking at your link for the Alcatraz Crime museum – I would enjoy going there. I can’t remember if I toured the Alcatraz Prison while in San Francisco, but maybe went to the Island. It’s been a long time (1980), so I don’t recall. Maybe just drove by it? I have read a lot about Ted Bundy over the years and how quickly women were attracted to him. He had a gimmick of asking young women/students to help carry his books as he said he broke his leg I believe and needed both arms to use his crutches. We had a serial killer of women in Michigan called John Norman Collins – he preyed on young women and raped and savagely killed them. That was around the time of Bundy, or just before, but there were a lot of similarities.

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    1. I visited Alcatraz in about 1975. My Mom had just died and my Dad took myself and my cousin Todd to San Francisco to visit my Mom’s brother and family. Clint and I were there in 2019 and we could not get tickets to Alcatraz, they were booked up 2-3 months in advance. We had a famous? murderer in our area too. Russell Williams and he was a LCol and our Base Commander at CFB Trenton. He was a real piece of work. He is still in jail, I think in a Quebec prison now.

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      1. Amazing that long for tickets to see Alcatraz. A lot of crazies out there. We think we’ve got some weird killers now, but we had them 50 years ago too. We still have a series of unsolved child killings from the 70s – four kids between 10-12 confirmed to be by the same killer, plus five more that they could not confirm it was him or maybe a copycat killer. They brought in experts, psychics – a huge manhunt for the killer, but he was never found.

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