Is There FAIRness in the World?

 Is there a place that you have traveled to when you were younger that you wish you could visit again?

You can pretty much read Elaine’s Wednesday post, with some of Patty’s from Monday and Angie’s from Tuesday, since they hit a number of places that I would love to revisit from when I was young.
These include Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Atlantic Ocean, historical places, the Blue Ridge Mountains.

There isn’t much to add. As for places fondly remembered and where we grew up and where we have traveled, have pretty much all been covered here by me,

and I hate to be continually repeating myself.

So I am reaching deep to come up with places that would be impossible to return to for anyone.

One was The Enchanted Forest.

This was in Maryland, closer to Baltimore than to the suburbs of Washington DC where I was born and grew up. Ellicott City was known for many years as a kind of ‘Las Vegas”, not for any gambling or raciness, but for the fact that one could run off and get married quickly there in the days of long paperwork, blood tests, and waits of most other places.

The Enchanted Forest was a beautiful place where there were little houses, characters and spots right out of fairytales. The huge dining hall was built like a barn, (it may have been one), and up in the rafters a Peter Pan watched over the diners,(there may have been others). There were activities and an enormous slide that looked like it went down a mountain and right over a lake. One of my favorite parts was riding on the lake in fair-sized boats that looked like giant swans.

The one downside was that the suburbs had not sprawled anywhere near as far as they have now and  I did not get to go until my aunt took me and a visiting cousin there the summer that I was twelve. I was a little too big to truly appreciate all of it, although I found all the imaginative depictions artistic and adorable; I had an eye for aesthetics.

I also hated that they made me go on a pony ride. I love horses, but I don’t like being on them. I felt very awkward on top of it all.

 I also wish that I could go to where I went with other aunts and cousins the year before: The New York World’s Fair, shortly before it closed, (1965).
We got there at the end of it, my aunt, a slightly younger cousin, a grown cousin and her two slightly younger kids, and her mother. My aunt was good, my grown cousin and her mother were two of the nicest women who ever lived. Still, I was the odd man out, so to speak and quite shy. I wish that I could experience and appreciate more of the sights, rides, and pavilions. The “Phone Company” and General Electric were particularly wonderful experiences, as I remember, with us in moving seats, automaton dioramas, and seeing what we could expect in the future…

as crazy as it all seemed, their wildest imaginations were not even close to what we actually have now!

Did anyone reading this get to that World’s Fair? Have you been to any other?
Whatever happened to World’s Fairs, anyway?

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