Howl’s Moving Castle

When I was a child there was a magical castle floating off the J Street Marina. You could rent it out and have parties there. I dreamed of having my sweet sixteen party on board (which is just funny since I really don’t come from a sweet-sixteen sort of crowd). I would watch it and dream of my princess-self in a fluffy pink gown and sparkly tiara, eating fancy little snacks and drinking sparkling juices amid a crowd of admirers.

Turns out, the castle was more of an, um, adult sort of place. Not so much something you’d want a little girl dreaming of.

While trying to decide what I wanted to do to celebrate my 30th birthday, naturally the Floating Castle came to mind. Sadly, it was destroyed in 2002, so no swinging to celebrate my 30th, but in my never ending quest to collect odd tidbits of info about my hometown, I began to Google about the castle.

I learned that it was owned by the same man who created Neptune’s Palace, a three-story party boat with an underwater dance floor. After it’s heyday, the owner donated Neptune’s Palace to a church and after it was abandoned totally, it just sort of randomly drifted down to the previous home of it’s sister, the Floating Castle, in the J Street Marina and got stuck.

Which, just…. Is it just me, or is the thought of a giant, abandoned building floating by with no one watching extremely humorous? The image in my mind is quite comical.

I have seen this thing in the Marina and had no idea what it was. I did not even know of it’s existence until I began Googling about the Castle. And, the strangest thing is that I must have been channeling the local newspaper because I had been doing all this research on the very day there was an article about Neptune’s Palace in the UT.

And so the end of an era is upon us and, sadly, my children will never be able to dream of debaucherous parties to celebrate their coming-of-age birthdays. Such is the world we live in.