Super Top10 Places You Can Visit From Famous Children’s Books

Super Top10 Places You Can Visit From Famous Children’s Books

Children’s books are escape from shuffled life. There are many iconic places from children’s literature that may be impossible to actually visit, but others are real, and they are just a plane ride away from you.

1. Channel Islands

Island Of The Blue Dolphins

Scott O’Dell got the Newbery Medal for children’s literature for his novel, The Island of the Blue Dolphins. The novel was published in 1960. The novel is a pre-defined story about a girl named Karana and she is left behind on a remote island off the California coast after her family and the rest of her tribe move to the mainland. For years she lives in near-total isolation, taming a wild dog to serve as protection, building her house of whale bones and sewing dresses of cormorant feathers.

What’s most amazing is the fact that it’s based on a true story. Juana Maria, also known as “The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island” lived alone for almost 20 years on San Nicolas Island, which is one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. In 1853, Juana Maria, the last surviving member of the Nicoleno tribe, was found and moved to the mainland, but she died just seven weeks later. While San Nicolas island is not open to the general public, you can still visit the nearby Channel Islands National Park.

2. The Plaza Hotel

Eloise

Eloise is a “city child” who lives on the “tippy-top floor” of New York’s Plaza Hotel. In the popular picture book, published in 1955, precocious six-year-old Eloise wanders the hotel’s halls, spies on guests, and always charges her meals to room service. Her mother is nearly absent, leaving her mischievous child in the care of a beleaguered English nanny. It’s hard to imagine that a real-life Eloise actually existed.

Today, the real-life Eloise is better known for being a Tony- and Oscar-winning performer than for her purported childhood antics. But the Plaza Hotel, located at the corner of Central Park South and Fifth Avenue, is still going strong. Anyone can dine in the Palm Court, just as Eloise did, and then you can visit the Eloise Shop. If you really want to splurge, you can even stay in the Betsey Johnson–designed Eloise Suite, which features original prints from Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight on the walls, black-and-pink decor that echoes the book, and an Eloise bathrobe. The cost for the suite is mere $1,295 per night.

3. Chincoteague, Virginia

Misty Of Chincoteague

Every year, wild horses living on Assateague Island on the Virginia coast are herded and swum to nearby Chincoteague Island, where they are then sold. The annual “pony penning” event was the inspiration for Marguerite Henry’s book Misty of Chincoteague. It was published in 1947. While the local legend holds that the island’s original ponies were the survivors of a shipwreck. Whatever their origins, Henry’s book drew an international attention to what was previously seen as low-key local tradition.

4. Green Gables Farm, Prince Edward Island

Anne Of Green Gables

In Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved 1908 book, a red-haired orphan Anne Shirley is adopted by elderly siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert and goes to live on their farm, Green Gables on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Montgomery based the Green Gables farm on her aunt and uncle’s farmhouse in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, where it still stands today.

The Anne books were the early-20th-century equal of Harry Potter, with the first novel selling 19,000 copies in the first five months after its publication. The series was so popular and well appreciated that the Canadian government made sure to include Green Gables farmhouse when it created Prince Edward Island National Park in 1937. Today, Anne tourism is a big buisiness with thousands of visitors every year coming from around the world.

5.The Boston Public Garden

Make Way For Ducklings

To find the right place for raising a family in a big city is tough, even for the birds. This is the lesson that Mr. and Mrs. Mallard learn as they attempt to settle down and find a place to raise their ducklings in mid-20th-century Boston.

As an art student in Boston, author and illustrator Robert McCloskey noticed families of ducks making their way across the Public Garden as he walked to his class. When he returned to Boston four years later, he noticed the traffic problem of the ducks and heard a few stories about them. The book just sort of starting developing from there. The Public Garden and its swan boats are still a major attraction in Boston today. Visitors take a ride, feed the ducks, and then take a snapshot of Nancy Schon’s sculpture of Mrs. Mallard and her broods, which was installed in 1987.

6. Metropolitan Museum Of Art

From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Precocious 12-year-old Claudia Kincaid, the heroine of E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, devises what may be the most ingenious running away plan in all of children’s literature. Understandably bored with life in suburban Greenwich, Connecticut and feeling unappreciated by her parents, she decides to take up residence in the 186,000-square-meter (2 million ft2) Metropolitan Museum of Art. Claudia and her younger brother Jamie moved into the sprawling museum, hiding in bathroom stalls to elude security, taking baths in the fountain, dining at the automats and sleeping in Marie Antoinette’s bed. They even solved a mystery involving a statue by Michelangelo.

The museum includes a vast collection of art from around the world, including a 16th-century French bed where Claudia may have spent the night. The Met gift shop refused to stock the book, and Konigsburg explained that it was because museum administrators feared that young visitors might take inspiration from the book’s appearances and try to spend the night.

7. Klickitat Street And Yamhill, Oregon

Ramona The Pest And Emily’s Runaway Imagination

Beverly Cleary spent much of her childhood in Portland, Oregon and as she started writing the Ramona books as an adult, she gave her spunky young protagonist a home on the delightfully named Klickitat Street. Klickitat Street is an actual street in Portland, just a few blocks from Cleary’s actual home. She supposedly used the street’s name as, “it reminded [her] of the sound of knitting needles.”

About 80 kilometers west of Portland is Yamhill, the rural town where Cleary lived until she was six. She drew on those experiences when she was writing Emily’s Runaway Imagination. Like the book’s heroine, Cleary grew up in an old farmhouse and her mother helped establish the town’s first library on the second floor of the Yamhill Bank, just as Emily’s mother does in the book.

8. Lake Pepin

Little House In The Big Woods And Little House On The Prairie

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie opens with a wagon ride across the frozen Mississippi River, as Laura, Mary, Pa, Ma, and their faithful dog Jack set out for their new home on the Kansas prairie. The ice won’t be solid enough to hold the weight of the wagon. The various home sites described in the series have become popular tourist destinations for Wilder super fans, known as “bonnetheads.”The river crossing occurred at Lake Pepin, the widest point on the Mississippi River.

9. Conservatory Water, Central Park

Stuart Little

In E.B. White’s 1945 novel Stuart Little, the title character is a mouse living with his human family in New York City. It’s considered as a children’s classic now, but Stuart Little didn’t exactly received the unanimous praise upon its publication. Malcolm Cowley, reviewing the book in the New York Times, expected more from a writer of White’s talent, declaring that he “found it a little disappointing.” White didn’t paid any much attention to his critics, and his story of Stuart’s mishaps and adventures in the big city was a hit with kids and adults alike. In one of the book’s most famous scenes was, Stuart competes in a sailboat race at Conservatory Water, a model boat pond in Central Park. Today, kids and adults alike can still rent remote-controlled sailboats or simply show up to watch the model boat races that are still held every saturday at 10 AM at the pond.

 

10. Paddington Station

A Bear Called Paddington

When the Brown family found a lost bear with a note pinned to his coat that says “Please look after this bear,” they did what any self-respecting London family would have. They took him in, naming the bear after the place where they found him—Paddington Station. Thus began the story of Paddington Michael Bond has said that he was inspired to write the first story after seeing a lone stuffed bear on a shop shelf on Christmas Eve. He bought it as a gift for his wife, naming it “Paddington” after the nearby London train station.

Paddington Station is still a major rail hub in the British capital and retains the same general character it had in the 1950s, when Paddington arrived there after his journey from darkest Peru. Not surprisingly, there’s a Paddington Bear shop, as well as a statue of the beloved bear at the station.