What is the last thing you’ve crossed off your bucket list?

Mine was actually last weekend, attending a lantern festival. For my birthday, my amazing husband surprised me with tickets for us and my parents to The Lights Fest in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.

I know you’re probably thinking about how bad these are for the environment (I have always wanted to attend a lantern festival, but morally felt like I couldn’t). The Lights Fest actually uses custom-made lanterns that don’t contain wires, and have a short flight time compared to standard lanterns. This means they fall a short distance from where you light them, designed for easy retrieval. Once all of the lanterns have fallen, volunteers go around collecting them! And the lanterns are biodegradable, just in case a few are missed. Here’s a little bit from their website:

We have a dedicated cleanup crew, waiting in the landing zone, whose focus is collecting lanterns after the event. All events are strategically located outside of populated areas where there is open space. We’ve engineered our lanterns for low flight and landing-site predictability. After the event, we have a large cleaning crew, picking up the lanterns. Our lanterns are 100% biodegradable, so in the rare chance that we miss one, they are designed to quickly disintegrate. Our “Leave No Trace Policy” allows us to make sure that our venues look the same after we leave as they did before we arrived.

If you’ve always wanted to attend a lantern festival, I cannot recommend The Lights Fest enough! I want to go back every year for the rest of my life! As if you needed one more reason to go, proceeds from ticket sales go to a designated charity in each city – so many reasons to go!

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the event! Make sure you catch the video at the end, and let me know what you think in the comments!

Interested in more things to do while traveling? Check out my travel page!

Pin for later!

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