The country music legend Dolly Parton has her very own amusement park, which is located in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and is home to over fifty rides. However, you’ll never see Parton herself on any of these rides for one very good reason.
Dollywood first opened in 1986 and is broken up into eleven different themed areas: Showstreet, Rivertown Junction, Craftsman’s Valley, The Village, Country Fair, Timber Canyon, Wilderness Pass, Jukebox Junction, Owens Farm, Adventures in Imagination, and Wilwood Grove. It’s so successful that it is now the biggest ticketed tourist attraction in Tennessee, with millions of people going there every year.
“We definitely want to expand with new things every year, eventually with a resort,” Parton told the Associated Press. “We may eventually have Dollywoods in other parts of the country, where we can kind of be true to whatever’s going on in that part of the world.”
Parton herself, however, will never ride on any of the rides because she suffers from motion sickness that is so severe that she would get sick riding the school bus as a child. This has always made riding rollercoasters out of the question for her.
“I don’t ride the rides. I never have,” Parton, 74, explained to The New York Times. “I have a tendency to get motion sickness. Also, I’m a little bit chicken. With all my hair I got so much to lose, like my wig or my shoes. I don’t like to get messed up. I’m gonna have some handsome man mess it up, I don’t want some ride doing it.”
That does not mean that she loves Dollywood any less, however. When asked in a recent interview why she thinks Dollywood has been so successful, Parton had an answer ready.
“Location, location, location. It’s a great place to be going right into the Great Smoky Mountain National Park,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of stuff to be entertaining for anybody that wants to come to this area, and all the beautiful things that are not mine, that are in this whole area. This is a wonderful place to visit, whether you get over to my businesses or not.”
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