Finding Indiana Festivals

One thing I’ve noticed about most cities and towns is that they each have some kind of festival celebrating the town’s heritage, geography, unique features. But unless you’re a local, or a festival fiend, you’ll have a hard time trying to find the different festivals that may even be just one county over.

Festival goers take heart though. There are a couple of websites you can use to find your weekend family fun.

Festing.comA national site that tries to link to every festival in the entire country. Search by state, by date, or even types of festival. Indiana’s page had 151 entries on it, while other states only had 10 – 20. It makes me wonder, does Indiana have a lot more festivals than other states, or are the other states just not keeping their schedules up to date?

IndianaFestivals.org – Brought to you by the Indiana State Festivals Association. Unlike Festing.com, this one is produced by a local association, not one-fiftieth of a national website. The ISFA will have a better hand on what’s going on in the Hoosier state.

VisitIndiana.NET – Not to be confused with this site, VisitIndiana.COM. VisitIndiana.net has a fairly extensive list of festivals, complete with descriptions and links to the festival websites. It’s a tourism website with links to and information about different things to do, see, and places to stay around Indiana.

GoogleI don’t actually recommend using Google to try to find a festival, unless you already know the name of it. It’s sort of like visiting the library to find a particular book by looking at each book on the shelf. It’s great if you know the name, date, or location of the festival, if you need a map, local news articles, or even if you want to find (or leave) reviews of the festival. Just use one of the the other websites and then use Google to find additional information.

There are other websites out there that also offer festival listings, but these four seem to be the most complete, most up-to-date methods of finding out the cool stuff happening in our state for the rest of the year.

Photo: McLoud (Corn Festival Parade)
Photo: Ardee4 (2007 St. Joe Pickle Festival)
Photo: Greg Robbins (2007 Northern Indiana Bluegrass Festival)