Waking up at Dream Away isn’t like being on Earth at all. If the Faerie Festival could be compressed, this would be an ideal place for it – though I Loved the grounds they had this year it was far too spread out and so either you’d want to get another couple of thousand people out there, another stage or two, another hundred booths maybe… OR compress the whole thing down to the size of the grounds of the Dream Away.
Myriad paths lead off from the shed and, after taking my first ever outdoor shower, I tried to follow all of them.
One path lead down to the pond where I’d been hearing all the frog noises from and I spent a good part of the morning circling the whole thing chasing newts and tadpoles and a bunch of different types of frogs.
Being buzzed by dragonflies no longer holds the terror it once did (my mom had raised me with the belief they could sew my lips shut and well into my 20s I still thought they could sting) and, however briefly, I actually did get my hands on a couple of frogs. Mostly I just made brief contact with their noses – waaaay harder to snag than toads.
Wandering another path lead me to the Labyrinth, which was nice and low and impossible to get lost in (I hadn’t explored this yesterday because I was visualizing something completely different and didn’t want to get lost before the show!). Beautiful flowers and all sorts of foliage. We saw a couple of hummingbirds and a dazzling array of butterflies. Heather and Kristen INSISTED on stepping over the “walls” of the maze, but I tried to just follow it around all its twists and turns. Back there we also met up with the only other human on the grounds, an older woman tending and pruning and watering. It’s a big job, I imagine it’s intensely satisfying.
Welcome to the Labyrinth. There was no David Bowie. His package was conspicuously absent. Beautiful spiral candle things, and many of the surrounding trees have Christmas lights climbing through their branches. Absolutely stunning environs – the Dream Away Lodge from down by the pond.
Yet another path lead me to another garden and yet another one lead me off to a whole other set of grounds that were wired with Christmas lights and covered in candle mounts. This must be purebred MAGIC when it’s in full swing and I can only imagine how Lovely it would be to have a wedding or a celebration here. There’s a gravestone and some chairs and ironwork tables, a couple of firepits and a half-a-hundred pine seedlings poking up out of the earth.
I explored long enough to get slightly sunburnt and then retreated to the gravel of the parking lot to load the car and get under weigh. Off to Victoria Station with its OWN brand of magic!
