Cooling temperatures, changing leaves and ripening fields are signaling that autumn has arrived — and that means the fall festival season is here. As farmers bring their crops to market, it's a great time to pack up the car and follow the sights, sounds and smells to one or more of the thousands of celebratory harvest fests across the country.
Read on to discover our top picks for the most colorful, entertaining and appetizing fall festivals of the 2016 season.
1. Harvest on the Harbor
Portland, Maine
Oct. 20-23 is a perfect time to visit Maine, as the leaf-peeping season reaches its peak and Portland rolls out its annual fall celebration of the state's finest locally sourced foods, beers and wines. Portland has enjoyed quite a renaissance in recent years, and its spiffed-up downtown and rockbound harbor district have attracted a host of top restaurants dedicated to perfecting the culinary art of preparing local, safely-harvested seafood.
Harvest on the Harbor shines the spotlight on the city's dining scene with a variety of competitions and tastings featuring local foods from more than 150 chefs, breweries, wineries and distilleries.
2. New York City Wine & Food Festival
New York, New York
Here's the quintessential Big Apple celebration of fall, bringing together top celebrity chefs for a four-day extravaganza, Oct. 13-16, dedicated to all things eating and drinking.
Guests can munch and mingle with their favorite Food Network chefs like Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray, Michael Mina and Geoffrey Zakarian. Featuring walk-around tastings, late night bashes and elegant sit-down dinners, the 2016 event is packed with parties and events for every taste.
3. National Apple Harvest Festival
Arendtsville, Pennsylvania
Staged annually during the first two weekends in October, this event has been drawing huge crowds to Arendtsville — in the heart of southwest Pennsylvania's apple-growing region — for nearly 50 years to celebrate a tradition that's as American as, you guessed it, apple pie.
Festival-goers can join in on apple-picking, apple-bobbing and pie-eating contests, drink fresh-pressed apple cider and savor applesauce homemade from scratch. Even if you don't like apples, you can watch live music from six stages scattered around the 24-acre fairground site, and peruse the nearly 300 arts-and-crafts booths.
4. Oktoberfest Zinzinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio
Another biggie, this one is America's largest Octoberfest celebration, expected to attract nearly a half-million visitors to the streets of downtown Cincinnati, Sept. 15-17. There's more than enough beer on hand to wash down the all the brats, schnitzel, sauerkraut and pretzels you can eat — and there are plenty of fun activities.
The beer stein race and bratwurst-eating contest are favorites, but the most entertaining event may be the Running of the Wieners. This hilarious matchup pits dozens of dachshunds in hot-dog-bun costumes in a 75-yard dash to determine the winning wiener.
5. Warrens Cranberry Festival
Warrens, Wisconsin
Wisconsin is the leading cranberry-producing state in America, and this event in Warrens has grown to become the world's largest cranberry fest, drawing more than 100,000 visitors annually. This year's event, Sept. 23-25, once again crowded the streets of the wee town of Warrens (population: 400) to celebrate the annual harvest of the tart and tasty red berries.
Visitors can tour the marshes, or bogs, where the berries are grown, eat cranberries prepared every way imaginable, join in a number of contests, watch a parade and cheer at the crowning of cranberry royalty. The town of Wareham, Massachusetts hosts a similar event, the Cranberry Harvest Festival, Oct. 8-9.
6. Apple Butter Celebration
Shenandoah National Park, Virginia
One of the Appalachian region's tastiest traditions holds forth Sept. 17 at Skyland Resort, high up on the park's Skyline Drive. The daylong celebration gets underway at dawn when fires are lit beneath large copper kettles filled with freshly picked apples.
Visitors join in the arduous stirring process as the boiling apples and spices are reduced to a sweet, aromatic spread. Then, of course, there's the tasting and an opportunity to bottle up a jar to take home. Appalachian style entertainment abounds, with performances by step-dancing cloggers and a bluegrass band.
www.goshenandoah.com/activities
7. North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival
Whiteville, North Carolina
Columbus County, surrounding the hamlet of Whiteville, is one of the top pecan-producing areas in North Carolina, and naturally that calls for a festival to celebrate the annual harvest.
This year's event — Oct. 26 to Nov. 5 — will feature a pecan parade, pecan-cooking contests and the pecan queen coronation. Other events and activities include a 5K run, arts-and-crafts displays and music from rhythm and blues bands.
8. Autumn at the Arboretum
Dallas, Texas
Named the number one "Trip to Put on Your Fall Bucket List" in the Dallas area by Orbitz Travel, this colorful celebration of the visual beauty of autumn is underway from Sept. 17 to Nov. 23. It's the featured fall event at Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden, a nationally acclaimed 66-acre urban oasis on White Rock Lake, just minutes from the city center.
The highlight of the festival is the Pumpkin Village, an artful and imaginative arrangement of more than 90,000 pumpkins, gourds, squash, bales of hay and cornstalks set amidst a garden ablaze with 150,000 fall blooming plants.
9. International Balloon Fiesta
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Few sights are more exciting than the mass ascension of some 600 hot air balloons, filling the sky above a grassy mesa near Albuquerque. This year's 44th rendition of the world's premier ballooning event lifted off Oct. 1-9.
Mornings offer the best climatic conditions for flying, so it's a good idea to be on hand early to watch the Mass Ascensions at 7 a.m. each morning. Nightly balloon glows create quite a sight as well, with hundreds of balloons lit from within by their propane burners.
10. Trailing of the Sheep Festival
Ketchum, Idaho
The tradition of driving livestock from their summer pastures in the mountains to the valleys below for winter probably got its footing in the Swiss Alps, and that's what this unique Idaho event is all about. Ketchum and Hailey area ranchers herd their sheep down to Sun Valley each fall culminating in a riotous festival, set this year for Oct. 5-9.
The highlight of the weekend is a parade led by more than 1,500 sheep trailing down Ketchum's Main Street. Visitors join in the pandemonium and also can take in the Folklife Fair, the Wool Fest (popular with knitters and weavers), sheepdog herding trials, music and dance performances and the ever-popular Lamb Dine Around and Foodie Feast.
11. Sonoma County Harvest Fair
Santa Rosa, California
It goes without saying that grapes steal the spotlight at this popular Wine Country harvest festival, set for Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. If you're thinking wine tasting, you won't be disappointed, but the headline event is the World Championship Grape Stomp, which invites visitors to join in the traditional and always messy method of extracting juice from the grapes.
Fair events also include cooking competitions, musical performances, pumpkin carving and even cow-milking lessons. Ultimately, however, you'll want to make your way to the Wine Pavilion to taste the prize vintages from hundreds of Sonoma wineries.
