Bekah's Bits: Meltdown Date Night

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Meltdown Date Night

I am sharing our date night fun with you a little out of chronological order! Yesterday I told you about our monthiversary date, which was a blast. But the week before that, we had another unique date that was really fun!

I mentioned in some post last month that we hadn’t explored many festivals since moving to this area. Since we grew up and lived in the same general area for the first forty years of life, we knew about the fairs and festivals in our county and the neighboring ones. We enjoyed attending those offerings and have so many good memories from them. But we’re still learning what happens on this side of the state! I remembered that there was a website that talked about festivals across the state, so I found it and learned that there was an ice festival in Richmond at the end of January.

If you’ve read here for a while, you might remember that a few years ago, we went to Richmond for one of our anniversary trips, and it was SO FUN. We did a chocolate trail and county-wide scavenger hunt and stayed in the coolest loft Airbnb. We still hold that trip high on the list of trips we’ve taken. Ironically, Richmond is now only about an hour away from us, so this festival was doable!

It’s called the Meltdown Ice Festival, and I am pretty sure I heard the competition emcee say this was the 11^th year for it. It took place in a little park that was just a stone’s throw from that Airbnb where we stayed for our anniversary. In a fun twist, I had a friend who was enjoying a sisters’ getaway in Richmond, staying in that very spot that very weekend! What are the chances? (Also, why didn’t I become a travel agent? I had such fun recommending the Airbnb and the chocolate trail to them.)

The festival took place over the span of the weekend and included an ice cream eating competition, a chili cook-off, and a bunch of ice sculpting events. We just went for Saturday evening, but I want to show you the fun we had!

Of course it started raining as we drove down, and it poured the entire night. We both had on multiple coats/hats/gloves/scarves and carried umbrellas, and we still got wet, but it was fun, so who cares!?

When we arrived, we walked around to look at the sculptures that had already been carved throughout the weekend. In a sad twist (for the festival organizers) it was really warm out. It didn’t feel warm, because the rain was so cold falling on us, but it was very warm for ice sculptures. I read later they had to house them in freezers overnight to keep them from melting, and everything was a drippy mess when we were there. There were many more sculptures than the ones I’ll share with you here, but this is a sampling. I really adore ice sculptures, so this was fun to see.

They even had a whole section of ice sculpture games, including a ping pong table, checkerboard, and cornhole sets. And there was a chair! (We didn’t sit in it. It was melting.) But I thought that was pretty cool! We did play checkers. It didn’t go well, mostly because I don’t know how to play checkers, so I was allegedly cheating.

Just for fun, we decided to walk over to the Airbnb where we had stayed, we took this picture, and sent it to my friend who was staying there. We had a whole miscommunication where she didn’t realize I was outside right in that moment, so we didn’t end up getting to see each other, but it was fun to see the loft again!

They had a handful of food trucks at the festival. Check out the Karb Killer! EEK!

The main event that night was a sculpting competition. It was fascinating to watch. They did three ten-minute rounds. Can you imagine turning out something like this in a half hour? I could work on it for a week and you would have to say “Tell me about this.”

And as soon as the competition was over and the audience voted, they had a great fireworks display. I was in the front row, so it was hard to get pictures, but here were a few of my attempts.