The Tofino Lantern Festival is awesome! It's an annual and very magical event held in the botanical gardens on the last Sunday of August. I'd been excitedly looking forward to it for over a year (we just missed the event by day's when we visited a year ago.) The garden trails are filled with all kinds of weird and wonderful lanterns made by the lovely people of Tofino. The botanical gardens which are beautiful in the daylight are magical and surreal in the lantern light. Luckily for us the gardens are just a around the corner from our house which was handy seeing as the event is "car free" and I'm pretty sure that in our usual style we'd have driven the big old truck the whole two minute drive if we'd been allowed. It was kind of a cold and foggy evening and with the kids all dressed up it had a very Halloweeny feel. Speaking of costumes the kids were encouraged to dress up for the occasion and the theme was fairies, wizards and tree nymphs......Seb, of course, insisted on Batman. *sigh*
We picked up our lanterns upon arrival, Bel's aptly had a little red heart. Keeping them alight while Seb and Bel swung them around violently proved to be a bit difficult :)
The kids got to be in a slightly chaotic parade while we waited for it to get dark and we did have a bit of a scary moment when we lost Bel in the crowd, eeek!! She's just too little!
Lots of the kids had made their own lanterns and I was pretty impressed with variety and creativity.
While we waited for things to darken up and the trails to open everyone sat on the grass listening to the band and watching all the little kids dance and go nuts over a bubble making machine. A lady later told us that Seb, I mean Batman, had amused a whole crowd of people by blocking the bubble machine with his bum while laughing hysterically. You can't beat three year olds for entertainment!
These shore bird lanterns were my favorite. Well done clever-lantern-making-lady whoever you are!
4 comments:
Beautiful Sophie!
Shar xx
Having discovered your blog earlier today from a RT with the Tofino hashtag, I've been gobbling it up. Having visited Tofino twice I now have it in my head to someday move there so I love reading about people that have done just that.
And I don't want to sound stalkerish or creepy at all, because I promise I'm not (that's what they all say, no?), but we were at the Lantern Festival and I know I saw your little batman! And the shore birds were my favorite lanterns as well.
Thanks for a great read on a lazy Saturday!
Hello Becky! Thank you for your nice comment, it's so nice to know that it's not just my sister and my mum reading this blog :) I think Seb made quite the impression at the Lantern festival being the least elfish or forest nymph-like but there was no convincing him to dress any other way that evening. I hope you keep reading, I'm sorry I haven't blogged much just lately, we've been busy redecorating.
I'll definitely keep reading! (And will likely stop in to Breakers when we're back in December.)
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