We're Keen on Keene, NH!

Carrie, Laura and I drove four hours north on Saturday to take in the beautiful changing colors, arriving in New Hampshire for their annual Pumpkin Festival. The Keene Pumpkin Festival is the largest of its kind in New England and proved to be quite the event! Attendees to the festival are invited to bring their own carved jack o' lantern, to register it, and have it become part of the ever growing annual festival record. On this day each year, the population in this ordinarily small town doubles with the arrival of folks and pumpkins alike!

The festival was complete with food vendors waving you over for a mug of hot apple cider, fresh corn chowder, fried dough, homemade apple turnovers, hot chili, or sausage subs as well as all day entertainment, pumpkin carving stations (in case you couldn't bring your own), a costume parade, a seed spitting contest, pie eating contest, and an amusement park. The culmination of the evening came with fireworks lit over the inferno towers of burning Jack o' Lanterns. So much fall time fun!

There were pumpkins of all sizes . . . this one weighed in at 250 pounds.

This was just one of the two towering infernos of Jack o' Lanterns!