Lichtenvoorde’s Bloemencorso

The nearby town of Lichtenvoorde holds a Bloemencorso, or Flower Parade, every year on the second Sunday in September. For 2012, that was yesterday, and as it was a beautiful sunny day, we went along to watch the parade.

There’s a quite staggering amount of work that goes into making these floats, involving thousands of Dahlia blooms, and the results are spectacular. I took about 400 photos, but unfortunately, my camera lens (a Canon EFS 17-85mm) developed a fault during the parade, so I didn’t capture all of it.

As well as the floats, there are a number of marching bands and theatre groups taking part. First up was a Brazilian dance and percussion group from The Hague:

The children of Lichtenvoorde and the surrounding area have their own section in the parade. These are just a few of the floats (click for larger images):

 

 

 

 

Then the main floats started to arrive…

Many of the floats had moving parts. This next one is difficult to appreciate in a photograph, but the bison and the hunters both turned in constant motion:

This next one was titled “Water and Fire”:

Then came my personal favourite of the parade – carnivorous plants, complete with black flies in attendance. The plants opened and closed their jaws as they passed:

Keeping with the Nature theme, this next float was titled “Tarantula”:

Followed in turn by a bunch of killer wasps in “Attack”:

This next float was titled “Underground”, and presumably represented a mechanical mole, judging by the “miners” working it:

I’m afraid that it was at this point that my lens began to play up, so I haven’t got good pictures of the last floats. However, I want to make special mention of the “Verpakt” (packaging) float. This represented six Japanese toy dolls in their packaging. The dolls moved as they passed by.

A nice touch was the inclusion of a QR code on the “box”, which takes you to the fake web site of the Go-Kyo toy…

This float won the jury prize.