Yelp Review For Uncanny Valley National Park
I booked the “Guided Hiking Tour” in Uncanny Valley for my whole family last August, and we were thoroughly creeped out the entire time.
I booked the “Guided Hiking Tour” in Uncanny Valley for my whole family last August, and we were thoroughly creeped out the entire time.
The first day, we were picked up by the Uncanny Valley shuttle at our hotel, and immediately something seemed slightly off. The shuttle driver was an expressionless man in his 50s who wouldn’t acknowledge us unless we were within a 3-foot radius of him. When we caught his attention, he would look us directly in the eye and say one of three phrases: “Going to Uncanny Valley?” “I’ve been driving this thing for 15 years,” and “All aboard!” I thought nothing of his strange manners until after we’d lugged our backpacks and hiking boots into the car and buckled into our seats when he turned his head back and said: “Welcome to the shuttle, family.”
When we finally arrived in Uncanny Valley, things only got worse. Our tour guide greeted us in the parking lot by shaking all of our left hands with his right hand and saying: “Good morning, father,” “Good morning, mother,” “Good morning, child,” and “Good morning, slightly smaller child.” He was just as expressionless as the shuttle driver but noticeably younger. We couldn’t help but notice because as we walked toward the wilderness hut for our check-in, he kept saying: “I’m younger than the shuttle driver.”
The four of us were in a tour group with four others whom we assumed were another family. But it wasn’t until we engaged in a casual conversation with them during the first leg of the hike that we discovered that these four were complete strangers. We found this particularly odd since their party consisted of an older woman, a middle-aged man, a child around the same age as my nine-year-old, and another child that couldn’t have been older than four. Yet the youngest child in the party was adamant that none of them knew each other, and repeatedly said: “I’m just a regular child going on a hike by myself.”
The trek was undemanding on the first day, and the scenery was eerily beautiful. The only caveat was that during our break the middle-aged man in our group kept biting into the raw onion he had packed for lunch, opening his mouth to let the bite fall out, and saying: “This is food to me.” My wife was so unsettled by this man that she almost threw up. She was unable to continue with the hike that day, so our tour guide decided we should camp under the stars, to which the four strangers replied in unison: “Yes, our favorite: sleep!”
I think I can safely say that the first and only night we spent in Uncanny Valley was the worst experience of our lives. My family got no sleep because the four strangers stared at us the entire night while the tour guide intermittently whispered: “Don’t be scared. They love you.” Our youngest boy was also mentally scarred after agreeing to play a “game” with the two vacant-eyed children right before bedtime, which consisted of watching the pair as they practiced laughing. He was then supposed to rate the howls on a scale from 0–5, where 0 was “I love this” and 5 was “I love this so much.”
In the morning we quickly packed our things, hurried back toward the hut, and hopped on the shuttle where the driver greeted us in a horrifying voice: “Why are you going so soon, family?” When we finally got back to our hotel, I asked the concierge at the front desk about the Uncanny Valley National Park and if other hotel guests had had the same experience, to which he responded that the national park had been closed for over 20 years.
We are never going back.
One star.
