Lantern Fest - Take 2

Last September I went to Utah's Lantern Fest out by the Salt Flats. I guess they started doing it twice a year now... once in the Spring and once in the fall. Because I went to the last one, I now get emails for when they come back. I don't mind.

I bought 2 tickets because I had planned for Stacey and I to go so that we could add it to our dancing through Utah video. Well... when Stacey bailed on the video, I now had an extra ticket to this even and had no idea who was going to go with me. I already paid for it, so I didn't want to waste the money and not go... although I was no long excited to go to the festival... mostly because I had nobody to go with and it's a big ordeal that I wasn't in the mood for.

At first I almost got my summer adventure club to come with me, but then non of them bought tickets and I found out most of them had a friends wedding that night. Then I asked my friend Amber if she would go with me, and she said she wanted to go but it would depend on if she was feeling up for it since she was under the weather. I kind of counted on that but then didn't hear from her Saturday, so I text her early in the afternoon and she said she wasn't going to go. I then gave up on trying to find someone to go with me and decided to try and sell both tickets. So I posted them on 3 different yard sale pages on Facebook and also posted it on my ward Facebook page. Apparently my roommate MacKenzie saw me posting it everywhere and she text me saying she really wanted to go. Funny... you would think I would ask her first since we live together but I hadn't really seen her much that week and she never really takes me up on those kinds of things so I just figured she wouldn't want to. I figured WRONG! I was so excited.

So MacKenzie rushed home and we grabbed some warm things and left to go to the Festival. It's an all night thing so we of course stopped by Sodalicious to get a drink and treat and then stopped by Freebirds to get some dinner to eat once we got there. The traffic was nuts... but once we got there, we found a tiki torch to set up our chairs next to and we listened to the live music and ate our dinner and watched the sunset. It was a bit windy and a little chilly... but I was content. I was worried that we were not going to be able to light the lanterns because it was so windy. However... it cleared up just enough for us to do it.

Even though I had been to the Festival before and even been to the real Festival in Thailand... it never gets old. It is seriously magical, especially when they put music to it. I maybe kind of teared up a little bit when they were playing Josh Groban. It never gets old... I would go to the next one in a heartbeat. They changed location this time so that they could fit even more people in to the Festival so there were even more lanterns than last time. Such an awesome experience. I'm so glad that MacKenzie wanted to go with me last minute so that not only my tickets didn't go to waste... but it also made my entire weekend. Experiencing a festival like this makes you smile and think of how great life is.

It is so hard to do this festival justice with pictures.... so I decided to include a video this time as well.