Adventurer's Journal

Journal #4 The Magical Floating Island: Knights and Dragons

You guys know the drill by now. A new day and new activity from "Ultimate Trinket Adventure [Mainland]" 

This time the world I'm currently exploring is the Magical Floating Island. To clear this area I needed to choose one of 3 picture prompts to blog about. The world seemed to explore a childhood theme and keeping that in mind the three pictures that we had to choose were

A) A Boy with a Buffalo
B) A wandering child (More on this picture in my next entry)
C) Two Children in a deserted area.

The one I wound up going with was ... drumroll please...

Yeah I went with the two children. Why this one? The picture reminded me of my own childhood. I have a brother a year and a half younger and there are a lot of pictures where I am carrying him just like that one. The image just triggered a little bit of nostalgia for me. I began thinking of our childhood together. My brother and I had wild imaginations. As opposed to Sports, the games we would play tended to be more of the fantasy type.

Inspired by the tales of Camelot involving King Arthur we would often imagine we were Knights of the round table. The playground in our neighborhood became an entire fantasy world. The Monkey Bars in the park were a castle. The Jungle Gym a cavern. The swings in the park became horses we could ride. We would journey through the park using sticks as swords swinging them against the wind picturing we were slashing at imaginary enemies. We would face off against evil knights, and dragons in our quests. I remember us having to use our imaginations quite a bit.

As part of our quests we would collect various treasures (Acorns and sycamore seeds in the summer, fallen leaves in the fall and Icicles in the winter. Discarded bottle caps were coveted prizes for us). Our neighborhood friends would join in the games with us and we often had an entire party on our quest. One of our legendary adventures was facing off against a Great Gray Dragon. We had a gigantic rock in the middle of the park that would take on that role for us. We attacked it and after a well fought battle we defeated it achieving an epic victory.

As we got older we stopped going to the park but it didn't put an end to our imaginations. Our fantasies lived on in board games, stories and video games. My brother was the one who discovered and introduced me to the Dungeons and Dragons board games series. With model figures and paper maps we were able to bring our fantasies to life in remarkable details. Books like the Lords of the Rings and the Harry Potter series served to bolster our imaginations. Our adventures continued in video games as well. We didn't get a chance to play any videogames until we were teenagers. Our parents saw videogames as a distractions so there was no chance we could get a video game system from them. Luckily our Aunt bought one for us. With the system my brother and I would pool our allowance and birthday gift money to get video games and eventually amassed a pretty good collection of Fantasy games. Included in the mix were an 8 bit old school classic Ultima 4, the multiplayer dungeon game Hexen, strategy games like Heroes of Might and Magic, Action platformers like The Legend of Zelda as well as RPG's like Dragon Lore, Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire. We didn't have a shortage of Fantasy worlds to explore for us to dive into. Our evenings, weekends and vacations were often spent lost in videogame worlds taking on challenges, completing quest and facing off against medieval monsters.

As an adult I don't get the chance to play many video games these days. Nor do my brother and I share a room or even live in the same place anymore. (We are still really close though and see each other a lot.) We definitely don't get to stretch our imaginations that often. We still get a chance to put them to the test as we have nieces and nephews to play with. My brother and I helped our youngest nephew build a Lego Castle set a couple of weeks ago and we spent the evening flying dragons across the sky, sending knights on quests and battling evil wizards.

The games may have changed along with the generations but there is still always room for fantasies in our lives!

Word Count: 762 Words