The Festival of Lights held in Riverside by The Mission Inn Hotel and Spa makes it to various lists and for good reason. It’s free and it’s pretty. Since I’d been there before, I was heavily contemplating on whether I should bother with going there again. Well, in the end, I decided to just go to the event because it’d been a while.
I remember silently gawking at the beautiful Christmas trees back when I first attended the Festival of Trees at the Riverside Convention Center in 2019. Unfortunately, I didn’t do much gawking this time around. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t see enough holiday cheer in the atmosphere and was thus just turned off by everything.
The California Botanic Garden is a hidden gem within the city of Claremont. I say this because I only learned of this place recently and it’s such a nice find. I doubt many people are aware of this garden but I suppose this is a lie since the garden holds an annual holiday event here that’s quite popular (and on the expensive side) and when I visited the garden, there were a decent amount of people present. Not busy but not empty either.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I decided to buy a ticket to the first ever Anime Expo Chibi event. Regardless, I decided to buy a ticket since I was in desperate need of doing something to feel “normal” again. Would there be a lot of people? Perhaps, but I figured it’d be a lot less in comparison to the main Anime Expo event held “every” summer. And I was right.
Is the travelsphere finally back to normal? I think not and I think it’s a shame that so many media outlets are making it seem as though things are already normal or quite close to it.