Twilight Town

Do parents really allow their Labor Day vacations to be dictated by their teenage girl's book and film obsessions? I would've begged my parents for a weekend traipsing about Prince Edward Island à la Anne of Green Gables if I thought that would've worked.

Forks, WA is certainly capitalizing on the Twilight phenomenon. Wikipedia says Forks has seen a 600% increase in visitors since the books' publication – as though there were a reason to visit this timber village of 3,500 before Jacob took his shirt off here.

There are Twilight tours, several Twilight stores, a Stephanie Meyer celebration weekend, and movie props (Bella's truck!) set up at locations around the town. Restaurants serve "Edbread" and "Swansoup” with your pasta and hang quilt banners featuring graphic-T-esque cut-outs of Twilight scenes. Local motels have "Twilight rooms" where presumably you can satisfy your adolescent desire to, um, become undead.

For the record, it was just a coincidence that our Olympic National Park trip took us through Forks (thrice) but I think Rachel and I especially (Amanda has never read/watched the story) were pleasantly amused by the state of this otherwise nondescript, quaint town in the Pacific Northwest. We might have even taken some embarrassing pictures with life-sized cut-outs of the actors. Allegedly.