Love animals and visiting Tennessee? RainForest Adventures is a quiet little tucked away treasure in downtown Sevierville. Let me show you around.
Our second Tennessee hotel was located on a semi-busy highway that went straight through downtown Sevierville. With every bit of real estate taken on both sides of the road, Sevierville is an odd mixture of the weird and the wonderful, dotted with every roadside attraction you can think of.
And then some.
Which made it kind of awesome.
Before we set off on our Tennessee adventure, I did massive amounts of research to pull together a list of places we wanted to check out, looking for a cross-section of things that both the kids and I would enjoy. My goal was to fill up about half our time, and leave the other half completely up to chance, wandering to whatever struck our fancy.
RainForest Adventures ended up being right down the street from our hotel, and one of the places we had planned to visit. Situated at the less busy end of the highway, it was easy to find with ample free parking.
The tours are self-guided, which are perfect for kids darting from one exhibit to the other, and it was quiet with only a few customers when we arrived. The facility is neatly laid out so you can intuitively walk from one end to the other without needing a map or having any fear of getting lost. Big enough to keep the kids intrigued, but small enough to be just right.
With over 600 animals and 130 different species, there was a lot to see, but not in an overwhelming way. There were a number of animals that we, of course, had seen before, but also many we hadn’t. There was an exhibit with capuchin monkeys that we could have seriously sat and watched for hours. They were a lively bunch, particularly one of them, who we decided was a mouthy teenager who didn’t want to listen to his dad. Because that’s pretty much how he behaved.
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