So, why Forks? And why the exclamation point? It’s not just a group of eating utensils, it’s the home of TWILIGHT!!! (You may remember this style of writing from a former entry about DISNEYLAND!!!)
Maybe you’ve read Twilight. Or maybe you’ve seen the movie. It’s been kind of a big deal amongst tweens, teens, and, uh, grown-ups for the past couple of years. Well, this vampire love story takes place in a small logging town called Forks, WA. This town is a real place and in the past couple of years has boomed because of this book. T, hearing that we could potentially be near this town on our honeymoon, insisted that we stop by and check out the vampire and werewolf paraphernalia. So, we did.
The first thing to do when you get to a new town is to check out the visitor’s center, or, even better, the Chamber of Commerce. The Forks Chamber of Commerce Visitor Information Center is pretty amazing, as it includes two delightful ladies who know more about Twilight than pretty much anyone we’ve met, including the tweens. They told us stories about how the whole town has come together in support of the books: the hospital has even created a reserved parking space for Dr. Cullen, the “father” of the vampire clan, who works there in the novels. Seriously, you don’t see Oxford doing this for Philip Pullman – it’s pretty awesome. They also gave us a map of points of interest from the novels, which was a neat way to see the town. We wandered into the library, which was incredibly busy for 4:00 on a Monday afternoon, and we stopped by the Dazzled by Twilight store, which was filled with memorabilia and t-shirts and miscellany. The gathering of community piece of this was particularly interesting to Sociologist C; the joy of making a book come alive was nice for Librarian-of-sorts T, who was all sorts of thrilled by the nuances as well as more obvious ways that the town has embraced a fun piece of the pop culture zeitgeist.
However, after a happy hour or two, C realized that it wasn’t time to write a doctoral dissertation, and T realized that she seems to have a shorter attention span than the average teenager, so we continued on our way to Port Angeles (also featured in the novels, but in a lesser way), where we were about to make their honeymoon…international! Cue music and spotlights.
