My adventures: Ludwigsburg Pumpkin festival

Hello Friends!

I hope you had a great weekend

and I hope your Monday is getting off to a good start!

Like I mentioned in yesterday's "I Love" Sunday's post, we went to the Ludwigsburg Pumpkin Festival at the Ludwigsburg Palace. I went with my usual group and for once I actually took my professional camera with me (hence why all of these images are watermarked.

K, C, T, and Dom in front of the palace. Dom just didn't want to cooperate and look at me. Haha. I really need to get one of those camera buddy things to get kids attention!

Hey look, a picture of me that isn't a selfie! It's me and K, I asked C to take a picture for me.

Isn't this palace just gorgeous?!?!? There were too many small children at the bottom of this frame, which bums me out! It's why the bottom of this picture looks a little weird

So, this entire festival is about Pumpkins (hence it's name- Pumpkin festival). They build sculptures out of pumpkins! Every year they have different sculptures, I don't know that any two are ever the same. Some of the ones I saw but didn't get a picture of, where an astronaut, some mushrooms, the butterfly, and more.

This is Repunzel's tower! If you look at the left side of the tower (or get up close to it), you can see hair with a pink bow raised and lowered, it's pretty cool. You can see the hair in the picture on the right. It took us a while to get there, but we eventually found a way up to the tower (with a stroller, a toddler, a broken chick (me), and T (7 month's pregnant)).

A little cottage on the grounds. I hadn't seen this when I went to this festival last year with Mo, but I guess there was an entire section that we missed last year! It was all pretty cool to see. There were a TON of people here though, so of course that made us a little uncomfortable.

So, in our explorations, we found a cool little maze in the kinder (kids) section of the grounds. At the center of the maze was this little pond. There is a frog on either end of the pond and they shoot water at each other. Once you step on the last block (like C did here), they shoot water at you. Dom thought it was funny, so they went through it a couple of times

Once we came out of a little shop on the grounds, I told C that I was going to take a picture of the Eagle sculpture. C said "you mean of Freedom?" <-- this is what happens when you go places with military people and you see an eagle.

It's amazing the amount of detail that goes into these pumpkin sculptures. This piano was HUGE!

Of course the aviation peoples had to get a picture of the airplane made of pumpkins. It really stinks that I can't read German, because I would love to know what all the signs actually said in front of the sculptures.

Magic carpets, magic lamps, and mushrooms. This is kind of fairy tale-esque. I didn't really get good pictures of the different fairy tale characters in the kids area because it was on a down slope and those are kind of hard for me to walk down. It was quite cool though!

This is the back side of the palace, where all the pumpkin stuff is. This was just too pretty! I had to walk down a bit of a walkway to actually get this picture, but it's awesome to see the whole side of the building, framed by trees, with a rocket sculpture in the center in front of the doors. 

So friends, whatcha think? Isn't this place beautiful! There was so much I couldn't even get pictures of. There are beautiful gardens along each side of the palace that you can walk through or there is a straight away along the right side that by-passes all the gardens and goes directly to the festivities. There are multiple places to buy pumpkins and even a place to carve pumpkins. You can buy flavored pumpkin seeds, pumpkin flavored cooking oil, and some pumpkin flavored drinks. I can't wait to document this in my travel journal (there will be a video on that once I get a little more caught up in it!)