City of Lights Spectacular

Tonight we headed on into Truro, with our friend Alison to watch the festival of lanterns - which I thought was going to be school kiddies, singing Christmas hymns and carrying paper lanterns - ow wrong I was!
The paper lanterns were incredible - with mermaids, elephants, horses, storms in teacups, pirate ships - all huge and completely amazing....

I started taking photo's and couldn't stop - unfortunately I've only added about 20 of the 60 odd that I took, but I had to show how wonderful the parade was!

This storm in a teacup was really inspired!

After the main parade it was time for the Christmas lights to be switched on

After this the parade headed off towards Lemon Quay, so we headed towards the cathedral as we knew it would all end there.

We were really lucky - the tree lights had been switched on as a test, so we were able to get some crafty shots of them without loads of people

We took the chance to get a picture together, Alison seemed to think she looked like a little gnome - lucky her - I'm the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters!

We headed off to grab a coffee at the nearby Thornton's and when we got back, all of the 'animals' were around the Christmas tree, so we had a chance to get up close and personal with them

This horse was incredible, the puppeteer got the head movements perfectly

but my favourite was the Elephant - so lovely

Having seen all that we could we headed back to grab the bus back to the park and ride. The queue was long..... 3/4 mile long! However, everyone was in good spirits after such a nice night, and the bus drivers played a blinder, and I don't think we waited any longer that 20 minutes.

A fantastic night - the organisers should be congratulated!