Share on Facebook
]]>
Tanglewood Park is part of the Winston-Salem public park system. It has the usual parksy stuff, and boasts a very good golf course. It also has cool activities going on year round. Over the Christmas holiday, there is this cool Christmas lights display, a drive through in your car. There are about 180 really cool [...]]]>
Tanglewood Park is part of the Winston-Salem public park system. It has the usual parksy stuff, and boasts a very good golf course. It also has cool activities going on year round. Over the Christmas holiday, there is this cool Christmas lights display, a drive through in your car. There are about 180 really cool displays, many of them in motion, over a 4 mile course! We have discovered a great new holiday tradition here in Winston-Salem, and I’m sure it will become an annual event for us!
Here are a few facts:
Festival of Lights
Did You Know
- Tanglewood Park’s Festival of Lights began in 1992 with a generous grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Charitable Trust as well as funds raised by the Tanglewood Park Foundation.
- The first Festival of Lights in 1992 was a 1.5 mile route with only twenty five displays. Today the route has grown to just under 4 miles with one hundred eighty displays, of which seventy are animated.
- The Holiday Gift Village began in 1994 with only ten exhibitors under an enclosed tent. The Gift Village has since moved to the Red Barn and has grown to include 120 exhibitors.
- On average 250,000 visitors attend this yearly event.
- The largest attendance for the Festival of Lights was in 2001. As we celebrated our 10th Anniversary and honored those who sacrificed their lives on 9-11, an estimated 300,000 visitors converged on Tanglewood to lift their spirits and celebrate the holidays.
- The Driving Golfer display was one of the original displays of the Tanglewood Festival of Lights back in 1992 and remains today as one of the favorites of visitors. Each year Tanglewood adds or replaces exciting displays to the Festival.
- Each year Tanglewood Festival of Lights Outreach Program benefits over 12,000 disadvantaged adults and children from the community.
- Tanglewood begins setting up displays during the month of August to be ready for this large scale event which begins in mid November.
- There are now over approximately a million individual lights that complete Tanglewood’s Festival of Lights.
- Tanglewood’s Festival of Lights has been selected as a Top 20 Event in the Southeast and a Top 100 Event in North America.
It’s the 127th annual Dixie Classic Fair in Winston-Salem, North Carolina! Let’s see, that means the first one was in 1882!!! We had to go, because we’re Winston newbies and have to check out all these things for ourselves. I’m not much of a fair-goer, but as far as these things go, it was the [...]]]>
It’s the 127th annual Dixie Classic Fair in Winston-Salem, North Carolina! Let’s see, that means the first one was in 1882!!! We had to go, because we’re Winston newbies and have to check out all these things for ourselves. I’m not much of a fair-goer, but as far as these things go, it was the best one I have ever attended. It was easy to find a parking space and it only cost $5.00 in a dude’s backyard across the street from the entrance. They had a bunch of animals, old tractors, and other farmy stuff. They had a “Yesteryear Village” with demonstrations about how they used to do things back in the day. There was a huge area for rides and games. There were many, many junk food stands. My favorite was the Giant Turkey Legs stand. (I LOL’d but didn’t buy one.) Though we did buy a funnel cake and lemonade. I’m a sucker for funnel cakes! There are antiques displays and competitions. There are art competitions for all ages. They also have live music, chain-saw artists, trick bike riders, rodeo, nightly fireworks, etc, etc, etc! All in all, pretty cool!
]]>Last week Princess Gail and I had a great breakfast at a cool place we discovered through our Yelp iPhone app. It’s called the Midtown Café and dessertery, aptly named and conveniently located on Stratford Road close to business-40, which is central to everything in Winston-Salem. They only do breakfast and lunch, but they do [...]]]>
Last week Princess Gail and I had a great breakfast at a cool place we discovered through our Yelp iPhone app. It’s called the Midtown Café and dessertery, aptly named and conveniently located on Stratford Road close to business-40, which is central to everything in Winston-Salem. They only do breakfast and lunch, but they do it really well! I always start out with a hot chocolate, because I am uncontrollably addicted to it, so you can imagine my giddiness when this arrived:
I was already satisfied and ready to give them 5 stars when the actual breakfast arrived. I had the best banana pancakes I’ve ever had, sprinkled with macadamia nuts, while Gail had the awesome sweet potato pancakes.
We didn’t have room left for the desserts, but in a place like this, you can imagine! They are worthy of a specific trip and blog post when we really “need” a dessert.
Life is good!
: )
]]>