Enchanted Forest Adventures
This is gonna be a long one lol.
On my trip to Oregon, my sister and I decided to deviate from our usual course to explore the enchanted forest… theme park. Originally, we weren't going to go, but on a rainy day we didn't have much else to do and the forest was calling to us from afar… so we went. We packed a loverly lunch and set out to places unknown.
Neither of us had been to this park before - as it apparently closes for the winter and had just opened for the year that week. Upon recounting our adventure there to some of Emi’s native Oregonian friends, they all had been there but haven't returned since childhood. Apparently this is THE place to go for young children but here we were exploring it from a different perspective. This made sense in retrospect because a lot of the people we encountered were small children.
This park is on a LARGE hill, and it was raining - which naturally created slick conditions on the enchanted walkways - there were signs before you got into the park saying heels were PROHIBITED lol. I was wearing my hiking boots (as anyone who is familiar with traveling will know the evil of wearing your one pair of shoes everywhere) and I was glad for it. I'm also well versed in the stairmaster so the uphill climbs were not a problem for me. There were a couple of other things that would pose problems for WEAK guests. There was a pretty long tunnel (alice in wonderland themed tee hee) we had to crab walk through cause crawling hands and knees with a backpack would not work with how small it was. There were also a lot of weird step ups and inclines and mazes in the dark. Dont come if u got a wheelchair is basically what i’m saying cause you'll miss the whole park going around each attraction.
The very first look we had at the park was the castle, and inside we were greeted by this:
and MY GOD was I delighted. I had no idea what kind of park this would be, and walking in knowing I would be seeing a bunch of dioramas was such a pleasant surprise!! If you are familiar with my work in photoshop (I am yet to create a feminist blog page dedicated to my photoshop art but you can see it on my Tumblr) you will understand the delight and inspiration I was feeling. So I took a few pics of my favorites for… reconstruction (devil smile emoji) Now, this was just the first of many dioramas we would see - and not all of them were small like this one, some were the size of an entire room! And quite a few had little animatronic motions! All of them were presented within buildings constructed to look like different fairytale stories and were explorable to the max!!!
I'll go over a few of my favorite buildings now: The castle had a dungeon which held a wicked witch, the castle (as well as the rest of the fairy tale part of the park) had a lot of little details hanging on the walls that were cute little rhymes like declarations of the king or little parts of fairy tales.
I loved the caverns where they held Snow White’s seven dwarves. At first you walk into Snow White's cottage where you get to see their bedroom and some animals cleaning, but then you walk into a recreation of a cave that was pitch black and held glowing treasures. You really don't expect it whenever you turn your head and see the beautiful glowing green goo lakes and the dwarves themselves! This was by far the biggest diorama and my favorite. They all moved in little ways, turning their heads - or my favorite - the spinning glowing gem!!
Some other honorable mentions were the three bears cottage which I thought was so cute cause it had voice prompts as you went through the story (someone’s in my chair! Someone ate my porridge!) and the second to last part was like “they better be long gone by the time I get to my bed!!” And you go upstairs to see Goldielocs (presumably before the bears find her and maim and tear lol) there were also really cute mini quilts on the beds I loved. We also saw quite a few outdoor dioramas of shorter stories that had the limerick on a wooden sign in front and I loved reading them aloud with my sis (jack and jill, peter pumpkin eater, etc.). My absolute favorite building was a witches head that you had to enter her mouth to continue your journey - it was literally so cool.
There was a little pavilion that had the entrances to rides and some food stands and smaller dioramas before you got to the second half of the park. I really liked the little dioramas - there was a pinocchio one that had puppets they collected from around the world as well as some cute optical illusions. There was also another cave section that was so close to actual spelunking, there was one part of the cave that was touching both of my shoulders and I hit my head on the ceiling before the exit; my sis ended up going out the other way. I guess it is for kids though.
The rides of this park were kind of disappointing - we bought enough tickets to ride malandors challenge and the log ride once each (which was 20 tickets lol why did they make it like that? They could have just charged more for one ticket and made each ride 1 ticket instead of 5.) We ended up only riding malandors challenge though. It was a dark ride where you shoot at the animatronic characters for points. There was a scale on the wall before you went on that showed your status depending on the points you got; we wanted the tier called master of the realm for greater than 4000 points. We thought it would be easy cause they had the high score of the day up - a guy named dave who got 4500 points - but we got knights in training tier (the lowest!) cause I got a max of 700 and Emi got like 300. And we were aiming good!! It was just really bad sensors!!
After that we didn’t wanna go on the log ride (partly cause we thought it would suck and partly cause we didnt wanna get wet for nothing) so we decided to get a fortune from malandor himself, mine told me that I need to consider the people I keep around myself and if they would be good for me or something, the fortune did have my lucky number (72) on it so it MUST be true! Luckily they let us buy back our tickets and we got ten bucks in cash to spend... At the gift shop!
The one gripe I have with the gift shop(s) was that there was a disappointing lack of enchanted forest merch!! The first one we saw was in the second half of the park (which I have yet to talk about and will elaborate on after this) and was in fact mostly temu garbage toys. There were a few novelty mugs and magnets and bumper stickers but I was on the hunt for a sticker that would either fit on my DS or my e-reader. There were exactly TWO stickers in the whole park! A two pack of little stickers my sister got and a pretty large decal that I got that was just the tiniest bit too big for my DS, and now stands proudly on my computer. There were two other shops and one had a few more clothing items that I hated the color palette of (like, the decal on the shirt would be bright rainbow colors and the fabric would be like mustard yellow or greyish green ugh) and i’m not about to buy a bright red sweatshirt of ANYTHING. Mostly more temu crap tho. There were some CD’s of park music but I don't really listen to celtic folk in my freetime (contrary to popular belief lol).
I guess now is the time to talk about the second half of the park. There was a wild west themed town. It had some wax figure dioramas that were funny puns or something of the like. The main part of this area was a museum dedicated to the making of enchanted forest, which had quite a few original sketches, fun facts about the park and some original memorabilia. I learned all of the music was made by the founder's daughter - and also that the founder died like a month before we came. They were advertising his funeral service next to that plaque, which maybe some die hard fans of the park would go to - like Dave. But overall I didn't like this part and it was way different than the theme of like 80% of the rest of the park. Not very enchanted forest…
We had our lunch in the food court area which was right before the exit to the park. There were about 4 mock cottage areas that you could eat at if you were lucky (cause each only had enough room for about 2 patrons. Right before we gave up and were going to eat in a valentines day themed ice cream parlor, I saw a couple leave the yellow house and booked it to secure our place. Emi totally dropped my pear on the way there but I still ate it.
And thus concludes our adventure in the enchanted forest. If I could change one thing I would take away the wild west themed part and put the money into the rides. Half of them were shut down (which did cut down our admission price) and the open ones were lame AF. I also wish there were better shirts cause I totally would have bought one if there was a better color selection (read: white one) cause I don’t wear black or mustard yellow lul. I also later used the reclaimed ticket money to get the hi-score in a DDR machine to a dubstep remix of some classical music.