27. OGLEBAY WINTER FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

Wheeling, West Virginia

12/29/2009

When we started our journey through Patricia Schultz’ book we quickly realized what our biggest challenge would be – about 50 of her places aren’t really places, but events. In other words, we’d have to be in a certain city in a certain month – often times a specific day. With that in mind, we took advantage of my Christmas break to try and hit two of these events. The first was the Oglebay Winter Festival of Lights (which, obviously, only happens in the winter) and the second was Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade, an annual New Year’s Day event.

In order to hit a few other places on our trip we decided to start out three days earlier to make it in time to Philadelphia for the parade. However, we almost canceled the trip at the last minute. Two days after Christmas Laura got very sick and then the day before we were going to leave Daniel did too. By the 29th Laura was feeling better, but we were worried about Daniel, so we took him to the doctor. She gave him a thorough work-down and told us he would be fine and that he probably had the same stomach bug that had attacked his mother. She assured us he would probably be right as rain by tomorrow morning. Laura and I talked seriously about cancelling the trip anyway, but with the doctor’s assurances we started on our journey. Both Laura and I were glad we had taken Daniel to the doctor though, just for our peace of mind. We’d gladly never go on another trip again if it meant keeping him safe.

We timed our trip to Wheeling so we would arrive around 6:00 pm, so it would already be nice and dark for the lights. Basically, the Winter Festival of Lights is a six-mile driving circuit around the Oglebay Resort – which we discovered is actually the largest publically-owned facility of its kind in the nation. (In other words, it’s not a country club. It’s more like a really fancy public park.) The drive-through is free, although they do ask for a donation. Can’t blame them for that. Laura and I enjoyed the many moving displays. We were excited about how Daniel would react, but he seemed nonplussed. He was still a little under the weather, plus, since the whole thing is experienced in a car I don’t think he could really see that well from his car seat.

To be honest, you’ve probably seen better individual displays on people’s houses – we’ve all seen those “Seriously, how high is your electric bill?” monsters. But in terms of scale, this is miles and miles of different displays you’re not going to find anywhere else. We stopped in the visitor’s center and there were a lot of kids of varying ages all talking about how great they thought it was and discussing which display they thought was the best. (My favorite was the dinosaurs and Laura’s was the rocking horse, by the way.) No doubt, this place should hit anyone's “wholesome family fun” buttons.