If you’ve noticed about my festival posts, I try to focus on what festivals offer overall, not specific events that occur during it. If I happen to catch something, it may be written about as part of my experience, but I try not to let it make or break my opinion of the festival.

But what if the festival is overrun by a specific event?

At the Milan Historical Museum…

…they held their 4th annual Pumpkin Palooza.

…and I liked that it was in the midst of the museum’s old buildings…

…where families could see the free exhibitions, including the locally invented Hoover Potato Digger.

But even with…

…the pumpkin picking…

…the pumpkin painting…

…the pumpkin playing…

…and a bit of chess…

…there seemed to be a lot of waiting around for the costume contest when this was supposed to be fun for the entire family.

With children divided into groups…

…they waited here before being called to another line…

…where they were individually registered.

And while it was cool to see some of the great costumes attending, the rest of the festival was minimally being taken advantage of. It was now an hour and a half into this three hour festival and the majority of attendants were waiting in some sort of line.

Without a child of my own at hand (it was supposed to be fun for the entire family, right?), I was looking for one of those donated Kalahari caramel apples I read about in the paper.

But the only refreshments I found…

…were here, guarded behind the judges seen sitting in the pic above this one.

I also found these…

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…but I couldn’t find a source anywhere.

I could only assume that they were given out at a certain time and probably only to the kids. It was like one of those birthday parties where they played the games first before the cake, but I didn’t see any cake here. If I did, I may have stayed longer!

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Instead, with one final look around, I knew I had stayed long enough…

…even the bowling had been abandoned.

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