Lake Merritt - Fairyland
Our most recent outing took Melissa and me to Oakland’s Lake Merritt, a series of parks and greenways circling our downtown lake. In recent years we’ve voted for bond measures to upgrade and beautify the lake area and it really shows. We found dozens of possible fairy sites everywhere we looked.
The lake is much too large, 3 miles around, for us to fairybomb the whole thing in one day. So we started at Snow Park at 19th and Harrison and walked by the water around to Children’s Fairyland on Grand Avenue. https://fairyland.org/ Fairyland is a magical place created for children to let their imaginations go wild. We didn’t put any of our fairy furniture inside Fairyland because that might confuse kids about what they can play with. Instead we put things in the bushes outside the entrance.
This was a day much like our visits to the Morcom Rose Garden. We didn’t drop off any fairy houses but sprinkled groupings of fairy furniture all along our way. Sometimes we semi-hid them under bushes and trees. And sometimes we put them right out in the open. One spot in particular was on a large pink concrete pad just outside Fairyland. If you get a longer view it turns out this pad is part of a giant’s footprint. There are three of these prints leading to Fairyland’s entrance.
One of my favorite spots was a huge tree trunk sticking up out of the grass. There wasn’t room for a lot of furniture there. But we found a small niche where we could place a single chair for an adventurous sprite to sit and watch the world go by.
