Real Destinations From Books and Movies

One of the coolest parts of getting engrossed in a book or movie is realizing partway through the fiction is rooted in real life. Realizing the fiction before you exists in the world is an intoxicating feeling. These are some examples of real places brought to life through fiction.

If you grew up reading Laura Ingall Wilder’s The Little House on the Prairie, the good news is the homestead where the books take place is available for guests to visit. The Kansas homestead is actually a re-creation, but the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet, South Dakota, is Wilder’s actual home.

Fans of a certain stuffed bear will recognize Hundred Acre Woods anywhere, but the real forest in Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne, is Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England. The forest offers visitors a chance to see the forest where Pooh and his friends would have played if they were real animals instead of stuffed toys. Visitors can take “Pooh walks” to see the most influential locations in the forest.

The Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Missouri, is the real cave where integral plot points from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer take place. The complex offers multiple tours of several caves. While the events of the novel are fiction, the real cave complex seems as intimidating to the tourist as they must have been to Tom Sawyer.

Taking a turn to novels and films with more adult themes will land us at the Stanley Hotel, where Stephen King’s The Shining is based. The hotel, located in Estes Park, Colorado, acted as the inspiration behind King’s original novel. The hotel does not offer any explicit The Shining tours, but it does offer a spooky Night Spirit tour, where the guide takes visitors through some dark corners of the hotel. If you want to see where the movie filmed, you will have to go to the Timberline Lodge in Oregon.

Slouching toward silly, the summer camp where Wet, Hot, American Summer is located is in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Camp Towanda is not open to visitors for the film, and the entire website only seems to mention the film in a passing blog post. Still, the camp is located in the Pocono Mountains in northeast Pennsylvania.