Museum of Appalachia & Dollywood

Two days that pair the region's most serious repository of mountain culture with its most joyful commercial expression. The Museum of Appalachia in Norris anchors the first morning — 35 original log structures and 250,000 artifacts assembled over six decades into the most comprehensive portrait of Appalachian life in the country. Dollywood in Pigeon Forge is something else entirely: the theme park that Dolly Parton built from a small hillside amusement park in 1986 into a 150-acre park that now draws 3 million visitors a year. But the park's cultural core — the Craftsman's Valley where working artisans demonstrate blacksmithing, glassblowing, candle-making, and pottery; the church and schoolhouse transplanted from the mountains; the collection of Parton family photographs and memorabilia — is as much a statement about Appalachian identity as the museum. The two are not as different as they first appear.