I have wanted to go to this event for years and years, ever since I first learned about it from an insert in an electric bill that came to the office at Baird Engineering for Joe’s cabin in the mountains near there. Yesterday Bennie Yarbrough – Addie’s mother-in-law – and I finally made it happen. We finally found the parking lot & rode the ski lift up to the Land of Oz on top of Beech Mountain. It was very cool – we were riding over mountain bike trails, and there were bikers riding right underneath us, but I never got a picture of those. The guys in front of us, though, had their bikes with them riding up the ski lift – the bikes were on a special holder in a sort of separate car in front of them. That was pretty neat seeing that, too.
Land of Oz was originally a theme park built on top of Beech Mountain, but only operated for a few years before arson destroyed a good part of it. The history of it is very interesting, but it is now open three weekends in the fall every year for people to come and go through Oz. This revival was actually started by the former employees who worked there when it was a theme park. I thought that was pretty cool. In the first part where you walked through, there were lots of signs about the park, including this one about the man who first came up with the idea.
One of my favorite parts – well, I had many favorite parts 🙂 – was the Gale House. You walked through the house upstairs, & it was all fixed up like an old farmhouse would have been at the time of the story. Then you walked through this part that was all windy and black lights that was the tornado, and then in the basement there was a complete replica of the house, with the rooms all destroyed like it had been through a tornado. It was just such a great idea.
