If you like folk arts and crafts, or as they are called around this area, "Mountain Arts," this is a great area to shop for gifts. If you aren't particularly fond of them, no worry... there are plenty of outlet malls, Wal-Marts, and gift boutiques all over the region.

Dillsboro, North Carolina, is a picturesque little community from which the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad departs daily. There are several bed and breakfast inns in the area, a pottery shop in which the potter is seen creating whimsical pieces, Nancy Tut's Christmas Store, bookstores, and several boutiques with individual art and sculpture pieces, candles, and hand-made glass gifts.

Cherokee, North Carolina, is, as the name infers, a Native American community nestled against the Smoky Mountain National Park, with scenic vistas and crass commercialism raised to new heights. Among all of the tomahawks manufactured in Taiwan and the cheap mocassins imported from Hong Kong ("all man-made materials"), you can find genuine Indian crafts and artifacts, including carvings, dream-catchers, beadwork, and clay vessels. You can often also find the artist or craftsperson who created and signed the work you purchase.

From Cherokee, a drive through the Smoky Mountain National Park twists, turns, climbs and descends into breath-catching beauty, about 35 miles of it. The park road abruptly ends in the fray and hussle of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a tourist town from top to bottom. ("Myrtle Beach in the mountains," my daughter calls it.) A jumble of motels, candy shops, T-shirt shops, an aerial tramway, a convention center, several chain restaurants including T.G.I. Fridays and Hard Rock Cafe, at least one mini-golf venue, and an aquarium line the main road. Nonetheless, the natural beauty of the area and the restaurants and activity make it a fun place to walk and shop, and there is a fabulous Arts and Crafts Community just outside the city.

Just a bit further west is Pigeon Forge, home of Dollywood and a huge outlet complex. The twisty roads of Gatlinburg give way to a flat four-lane highway lined with motels and billboards, but the shopping is just fine.

Keep going in the same direction and you come to Knoxville, a larger city surrounded by mountain vistas. Of course in a large city like this there are any number of shopping malls, but there is also the Old City, part of downtown, filled with little shops and boutiques.

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All photos copyright Jana M. Jones 2001