It's not often you get to visit places that inspired book settings (besides your own books, of course). After I read Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle books (only the first three, since The Raven King wasn't out yet), I started dreaming up this adventure to northern Virginia, where fictional Henrietta is based. Maggie made this even easier when someone sent her an ask on Tumblr about where they should go if they wanted to get the feeling of the Raven Cycle books. And then, over my birthday weekend, we went up to the Shenandoah Valley. Saturday was spent in Staunton, which was a little too big to remind me of Henrietta (to be honest, I sometimes feel like the town where my university is could be Henrietta, were it a teensy bit bigger and not in a different state). But we took the Skyline Drive for a while and then we visited the campus of an all boys' school that Maggie recommended in place of the fictional Aglionby. Ready for some pictures?
(This is probably one of my favorite pictures I took. I felt like this path would lead to Cabeswater. But, no, the trees didn't speak Latin.
So have you ever been able to visit places that inspired the settings of your favorite books? Or what places would you like to visit?
Sounds like an awesome trip. :D I think the setting might've been one of the things that made the Raven Cycle awesome for me, since it's just about an hour or two south of where I used to live. (Which meant that when Gansey and Adam go visit with Gansey's family in- Dream Thieves, I think? can't remember if it was that or Blue Lily, Lily Blue- I kept going "Oh, hey, I know that place! Cool!")
ReplyDeleteOther fun fact: when I was 13-ish, I read The Berinfell Prophecies by Wayne Thomas Batson. Two of the characters lived in upstate New York, and reading about the place they lived, I immediately decided that I wanted to live there someday and find a cute little bookstore like the one that gets the characters on their adventures. I forgot about that desire pretty quickly . . . then I moved. To upstate New York. Roughly two hours south of the exact area that the author was probably thinking of when he wrote that book. (Sadly, no luck on finding a bookstore like that yet . . .)
SO awesome! I love this series. So cool that you visited the places that inspired the book location!
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