Day 5: Oh the Places You'll Go.

I thought long and hard about this one. For day 5, I'm supposed to share a photo of somewhere I've been.  Hmmm...which fabulous location should I pick?  Decisions decisions.

In the end, I opted for this:

Fairy Tale Forest in Oak Ridge, NJ.  I spent a good deal of my youth at that place.  There were huge plaster recreations of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.  I loved it.  In later years, they tried revamping the place with bright psychedelic colors which was more trippy than anything else.  Sadly, the redo didn't help the park and it closed in 2003.

Heartbreakingly, the site remains much as it was, just in awful disrepair. There are a few videos on YouTube where people have snuck into the abandoned site and filmed.

Here's one:

And here's another (this one absolutely breaks my heart).

Lost in Fairytale Forest has some more photographs of it in the disrepair along with some historical photographs which show it how I remember.

What I wouldn't give to get a copy of that vintage post card!

Random thought: Near the Mother Goose statue, on a walking path, when you looked up, you saw a cradle in a tree with a plaque hanging. It contained the lyrics to "Rock-a-bye Baby" painted on a piece of wood in intricate handwriting. At about 4 years old, I saw that and it suddenly hit me that the song wasn't a sweet soothing lullaby, but was about a baby plummeting to her death from up in a tree branch.

None of the videos or photographs show any evidence of that cradle or the sign that accompanied it. What happened to them? The fact that there is no proof that that even existed (other than in my memory) bothers me to no end.