Because of our housewarming party, we didn’t get to attend the festival on Saturday night. Some of our guests did go down to see the parade pass through though, which actually lasted about 2 hours and featured 25 organizations and 7 marching bands. The all came back totally excited about what they’d seen so we knew we had to make sure to catch the parade when it passed through again on Sunday night.

The planning and organization of this event alone are probably worth discussing at length…but I’ll spare most of it. What I will say is that months before the fest begins, you will see floats at various farms around town as everyone begins working on them. They’ve got them hidden in a corner here and there and all get together over weekends and in evenings to invest more time. It really looks like a lot of fun and has sparked our interest in doing our next year – but I won’t really go into the details there just yet 🙂

There seems to be a theme for the parade each year and this year it was: “Willst du was erleben, darfst du nicht am Sofa kleben!” This basically means “if you want to live life, you can’t stay stuck on the sofa.” A lot of the floats involved some sort of sports and some people really seemed to go all out.

The parade seemed to be missing a few floats and a couple bands but the majority of them did still seem to be there – and were having a very good time. We were surprised at the number of people that also showed up. Probably half as many as on Saturday night but people still lined the streets completely which was quite impressive. Apparently on Saturday night it was 2 and 3 people deep everywhere around the route.

We took quite a few photos on Sunday night and I’m going to post most of them here. That makes it a very long post but photos say 1000 words so hopefully you’ll enjoy them. Don’t forget to click on them to see a bigger version. Since the parade is after dark some of them are a bit hard to see….but I think you’ll get the gist of most of the photos 🙂

We left our front gate and this is our view down to the Rathaus. It’s literally about 50 yards down the street which makes it really nice if you need to refill drinks or take a potty break during the parade 🙂

The first float was from the local wind orchestra. Judging from previous photos of the parades, they seem to have the same float each year…

The Fanfarencorps Königstein 1966 e.V.
A marching band from a town not all that close to here but still rather near Frankfurt

A photo safari to Africa…

…complete with mushers (good thing it was somewhat cool during the evening!)…

…and of course polar bears too

The volunteer fire department