Well, the last time we had a decent snowstorm, I went out and walked among snow covered trees... until I came to our streetlamp, which just happens to be a lamppost (albeit electric.) It was all very quiet and somehow mysterious, much like Lucy's first Narnian experience in LWW.

PS: Great thread idea! I'm guessing lots of folks on Narniaweb are gonna have stories for this!

My real life Narnia experience was on the April 2015 trip we made to the ANZAC Centenary Commemoration at Gallipoli, near to Istanbul, which we also visited. In a trip to the Grand Bazaar we went down an aisle of that very busy bizarre bazaar where we found a shop window with heaps of silver jewellery, advertising Aslan's Jewellery. Behind us & opposite Aslan's Jewellery was a shop, one of many Turkish delight vendors, in that particular passage, advertising Turkish Delight, in various flavours from the traditional rose water to apricot, lemon, orange & pistachio flavours, as well as other goodies like Baklava or Tabbouleh. On that trip, some of our fellow travellers had also bought there a dress-up outfit for their young daughter, complete with those Turkish-style upturned slippers, that looked stunningly like the one Aravis wore in HHB from Lazaraleen's home to across the desert. It was the sort of outfit with a short bolero style jacket & harem trousers, worn by those girls who lived & worked in the old Topkapi Palace, itself reminiscent of the Tisroc's Palace, including a gate onto the Golden Horn below it. Then on our return to Istanbul, to catch a plane to Paris, the waiter at the small hotel we stayed at was also called Aslan. These days Turkey is no longer the Ottoman empire & is a Republic, headed currently by President Recep Tayyip Erduagan, but Istanbul's pre-WW1 heritage was eerily like how I imagined Calormen.

Totally, Cleander! When a certain type of snow falls—big, thick, fluffy flakes—my pet name for this is "Narnia snow". And my ongoing love for winter only helps. How cool (in more ways then one ) you had that memorable experience with the streetlamp amidst the snow-covered trees. Whenever it snows, I always look around for a light (yes, albeit electric), because the amazing look of the snow coming down in that warm glow seems definitely LWW Narnian.

Wow, those are quite the Narnian experiences, wagga!

Growing up I went to a bible camp. There was a random lamp post in the middle of a wooded area. Each year I would sit by it in the evenings when everyone was doing activities or at the snack shack and wait for someone to come get me and take me to Narnia....Tumnus never showed up. However I was sure he was in the woods watching!

Well, the last time we had a decent snowstorm...

My thoughts exactly! I grew up in an area that gets tons of snow, so I've had plenty of "real-life Narnia experiences" related to LWW. I think my favorite was this camping trip. We hiked over hills and through woods, and I really felt like I was on an adventure in Narnia. I've had others, but that one was definitely my favorite.

I feel like the past 10 years of my life have been associated with real-life Narnia experiences. Ever since my family and I have moved into our second home, we've felt like our backyard was basically the Great Woods. Literally right outside our house is one of the largest urban parks in Canada, and I am and always have been forever grateful for it! Practically every weekend I walk in the park for hours, because I can't get enough of it! I always feel like I am exploring one of the forests of Narnia. Quite often, crazy-me even pretends that I actually am in Narnia and I am going on an adventure.

If I'm lucky I see many beautiful animals such as badgers, cougars, owls, etc. However, I often see deer and ducks almost every time.

Those experiences all sound very evocative, Trufflepuff, Geekicheep, fledge1!

This morning when I was out for my early morning walk, there was mist/fog in the lower places, but in the north I saw a strange dark cloud rolling in. It looked so unusual, in that it wasn't just up in the air ... it came right to the ground. This reminded me vividly of the Dark Island, and I waited out by my favourite dawn-viewing place amongst the fields to watch it roll over me. It was almost freaky ... I disappeared into that cloud and all scenery vanished in its wake. While I didn't know fear like they did at the Dark Island in Voyage, it was quite a surreal and cool (literally and figuratively) experience.

And now, a few hours later, the spring sun has burned away those low-lying clouds. But I did not notice an albatross.

Transferring posts from Forum 2.0:

Courtenay » May 27, 2020 11:00 am

This wasn't exactly a real-life Narnia experience, but it was certainly something in our world that reminded me of the Chronicles... a couple of times last week, I was heading into North London to do some home caregiving visits, and as I was driving on the North Circular Road, I noticed one of the intersections was called Colney Hatch. I recognised the name at once and quickly remembered where I knew it from — in The Magician's Nephew, when Jadis is on the rampage in London and demands to be acknowledged as Empress, someone in the crowd sarcastically hails her with "Three cheers for the Hempress of Colney 'Atch" (bit of Cockney there for you — and "Colney", by the way, is pronounced "Coney").

As for why they said that, I vaguely recalled hearing this somewhere before, but have just confirmed it from Wikipedia:

The area became well known from the mid-19th century following the building of Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, which gained such notoriety that the name "Colney Hatch" appeared in various terms of abuse associated with the concept of madness.

Interesting to have an authentic historical snippet thrown in there — I would guess Lewis probably knew the term from his own childhood in the Edwardian era. Also interestingly, the original asylum building is still there, though it's now been converted to luxury flats. Probably a much nicer place to live now!

lions remind me of aslan   I’m a lot like lucey

We drove past a cafe called 'Cafe Narnia' where I'm staying this weekend, and the next day I went to look at it. New owners had reduced its Narnia qualities, but it still had one entrance via a 'wardrobe' with a few fur coats hanging in it. Apart from that, there was a movie poster, some figurines from the movies, a DVD cover, and what looked like a box set of the books. 

The menu had one Narnia reference, 'Aslans Feast', a cooked breakfast. 

No, I wasn't in Narnia, but a white-haired man with a beard was sitting at a table near the main door, and I wondered if he could be the Professor! 

As I mentioned in another post recently, last week I had the delightful experience of seeing red squirrels — which are native to Britain but now endangered here — in a woodland in Wales last week. Apart from reminding me of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, which happened to be C.S. Lewis's favourite out of Beatrix Potter's stories, this of course made me think of Pattertwig from Prince Caspian — he only really has a bit part in the story, but it's a memorable one...

After that they went on till they came among tall beech trees and Trufflehunter called out "Pattertwig! Pattertwig!" and almost at once, bounding down from branch to branch till he was just above their heads, came the most magnificent red squirrel that Caspian had ever seen. He was far bigger than the ordinary dumb squirrels which he had sometimes seen in the castle gardens; indeed he was nearly the size of a terrier and the moment you looked in his face you saw that he could talk. Indeed the difficulty was to get him to stop talking, for, like all squirrels, he was a chatterer. He welcomed Caspian at once and asked if he would like a nut and Caspian said thanks, he would. But as Pattertwig went bounding away to fetch it, Trufflehunter whispered in Caspian's ear, "Don't look. Look the other way. It's very bad manners among squirrels to watch anyone going to his store or to look as if you wanted to know where it was." Then Pattertwig came back with the nut and Caspian ate it and after that Pattertwig asked if he could take any messages to other friends. "For I can go nearly everywhere without setting foot to ground," he said. (chapter 6, "The People that Lived in Hiding")

And I must admit, when I spotted one of the squirrels running and hopping from branch to branch with a nut in his mouth, I couldn't help respectfully looking the other way to make sure I didn't see where he was taking it!  

I think of Narnia when visiting beautiful places in Nature in our own world. It is places where I enjoy birding such as nature trails that remind me of Narnia the most.  Of course it is American birds and wildlife that I see there, but the landscapes are still a lot like Narnia. It is getting more difficult to find them in our modern world, but you still can find them if you look carefully. 🙂

@narnian78 Well said!

Speaking of looking carefully and finding Narnia, I recently changed jobs and started exploring the area around my offices...to find that just behind the parking lot was a wooded path leading down to a secluded pond. At first all I found were some broken stone benches and an abandoned rowboat, but then I started noticing strange tree stumps that appeared to have been rounded off at the tops, rather than broken jagged or sawn off straight. They were covered in strange grooved lines that looked a bit like tooth marks. Going further on I started finding whole fallen logs with semicircular chunks taken out of them, again with these strange toothlike marks on them. It was then that I came to where the pond was fed by a narrow stream, and,  stretching across it, was a real beaver dam!!!

(They didn't seem to be home, so I wasn't invited for dinner or anything).

Even if they never invite you for dinner, at least you may have the chance to see them.

Where I grew up - in a forest area in Southern Norway, with a river running by - there were beavers. 

I remember those logs with the tooth marks where they had been gnawed off, and the tree stumps with the same kind of tooth marks. I've seen beavers several times, and occasionally they have seen me too, and smashed their flat tail against the water surface with a mighty splash, to warn the other beavers nearby against me  

Needless to say, I wasn't invited to dinner either