Dollywood Day 2

Yesterday I mentioned we were going to arrive earlier to enjoy Dollywood more. We did arrive an hour earlier, however, the heat was much worse due to much less cloud cover, and the kids were so wiped out by 2:00 that we spent about the same amount of time at the park today as we did yesterday. We attended two shows today, revisited a few favorite rides, and hit a few new rides. We still did not cover all of the kids' section of the park, and there are some other sections for kids we did not even visit. Since Rebekah was so hesitant in the pool yesterday, and Joshua was even skiddish in the water area at Coolidge Park, we are pretty sure we are going to use our third day to visit Dollywood again. We would hate to attend Splash Country to find that the kids do not like it and lose a good day to visit some other rides at Dollywood that we have missed. However, we are taking a day to rest from all the sunny outdoors so much, and our plans are to hit the amusement park on Thursday.

When we arrived this morning the kids were eager to hit the little kiddie rides from yesterday. Both of them wanted to ride "Busy Bees". How can you say no?



Since it wasn't crowded at all the kids got to ride by themselves.



I won't bore you with a bunch of photos from repeated rides, but we did a few. Rebekah and I also rode the swings. This was a first for her, and she loved it!

At 10:30 we saw the performance of "Llama Llama Red Pajama". This is a favorite book in our home. There is a great deal of rhyming, and children can relate well to the story of a child who deals with all kinds of emotions laying in bed waiting for his mama. The play added some extra plot in order to create a longer storyline, but it fit well with the Llama - Mama- Drama rhyming and theme. It was a really cute play.


Mama llama takes baby llama grocery shopping...


...at Shop-O-Rama


Now for the real story...





Posing with the characters


After lunch we attended the show by the Kratt Bros., stars of the PBS Kids show "Zoboobafoo". Joshua enjoyed the show, but about half-way through he began to lose interest. He has never cared much for the television show. However, Rebekah told me tonight this was one of her favorite shows. I think she'll be interested in watching their T.V. program more now that she has seen them live.


Chris "finds" a porcupine in the Smoky Mountains. It was so much bigger than I realized they are.


Martin "finds" a baby zebra.


Chris pulls out a snake.


Martin with a beaver


Albino python


Baby kangaroo at 4 months old


And finally, the all-famous-on-their-show lemur


Following the Kratt Bros. show we took one more ride before calling it a day. We rode the 1950s cars. Darrin and Rebekah rode together while Joshua and I rode in a separate car.



After looking more closely at the Dollywood map I have seen we have barely tipped the iceberg where it comes to Dcllywood. There is so much more to do there, so it looks like we'll be spending another day to try out many more things to ride and do. But, as you can see, the kids were wiped out after two back-to-back days of outdoor fun, so we'll enjoy a day off before we hit the park again.