Winter Garden Heritage & Music Festival 2023

Posted on by Ian C.

We spent much of the day enjoying the “120th anniversary” celebrations downtown in Winter Garden – our first activity was an interesting (though hard to hear due to all the music) history walk along Plant Street where we learned among other things that it’s really only the 115th anniversary of establishing Winter Garden (a misread in the past of hand written “1908” as “1903”!)

There were lots of food choices with many food trucks and stalls as well as the regular Winter Garden restaurants, all very busy!

And there were five or more stages set up for music and other performances; we enjoyed blue grass, country and other performances at various locations … Here’s some photos from the day:

I did a little video recording of some of the performances, as well:

Leu Gardens Dazzling Nights 2022

Posted on by Ian C.

We returned to Leu Gardens this evening to catch the final night of the “Dazzling Nights” lights show; it was quite different to last years event but still very enjoyable – especially the laser/lights/music show which I have some video of at the end of this post. Meanwhile, lots of photos of course!

And here as promised, some video from the music synchronized laser/lights that we found – when we got there two performers were singing live, later it was recordings but it was all good!

Asian Lantern Festival 2022

Posted on by Ian C.

Last year we visited Sanford Zoo to see their spectacular Asian Lantern Festival; in fact it was so good we went twice last year – and last night we returned, taking friends with us. Amazingly we saw almost no repeat designs from last year, with everything different but just as spectacular as our previous visit – and here of course, are lots of photos …

A number of the “lanterns” are animated (some even interact, responding to banging drums nearby!) so here’s a video compilation of some of the moving displays: