Festival Of Lights

On the way out to Autumn's birthday party (see previous post) we noticed a carnival set up just off the interstate and a set of lights in the field next to it. It looked like one of those drive through light displays. We had seen it set up a couple years ago and meant to go by then, but never did. On the way home from the birthday party we saw it again and decided to try and find it.


Ginger used the iPhone to determine the location of the lights and found out they opened at five thirty. So rather than drive all the way home, and then turn right around and head back out we decided to head to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Our list of restaurants we can go to with Catherine's nut allergies is rather limited, but luckily Sweetwater qualifies (lucky for everyone else, I've never been a big fan of the food at Sweetwater personally) and it was even sort of on the way to the light show.


The light show is at Bull Run park (here's the link to their site). The entrance fee is $15. Too bad they wouldn't take the picture of the coupon on the iPhone for the $3 discount. I'm kidding, while I am known to be cheap we didn't even try that (mainly because we didn't know about the coupon at the time).


Sadly these photos don't really do the exhibit justice. They have lots of animated lights like reindeer jumping, toy cannons being fired over the road, Jack Frost blowing snow, animated penguins, etc.


The pictures are also seat of the pants so to speak since you're not allowed to stop the car as you drive through, nor are you allowed to get out for pictures, so all these were taken from the moving car (yes, that's my lame excuse for why they're only so-so).






I'm probably the only one that noticed that Santa's sleigh only has seven of the eight reindeer. There are actually eight shown, but one of them (by the red nose) appears to be Rudolph, so they're missing on of the originals (like I said, I'm probably the only one that looks for these inconsistencies, I suppose it's my comic book inspired need for continuity nature coming to light). Guess they forgot that Rudolph wasn't one of the original eight.


The carnival is at the end of the exhibit. Since it was pretty late (and it was getting a bit cold too) there was no way we were going to go to the carnival. But the fact that you have to pay the entrance fee to get in and then have to pay more for the carnival seems a bit extreme to me (I suppose it's possible there's another way to get to the carnival, but I didn't see it if there was one).