Today I visited the KiKa Summer Tour in Wiesbaden with my daughter.  This was our third visit to one of the tour events, having visited Wiesbaden and Cologne in previous years.

With temperatures forecast for around 30°C it was the perfect day for it, even though there was a chance of thunder storms in the afternoon.

The amount of attractions laid on had either increased in number compared to the event two years ago, or were spread out more.  I certainly felt that there were not as many people there as there had been two years ago, but maybe that really was due to having a larger area and two different stages.  Certainly the queue to climb up “Bernd das Brot” was not as long!

In fact, the queues are the worst part of the day – that being reminded with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) hints that KiKa is funded by the license fee.

Everything else is well done for the children.  There is an area in front of the main stage where only children can enter.  On entering, the mobile phone number of one of their parents is written on their arm, so that when they want to leave, the crew can contact someone.  Obviously the phone needs to be turned on and audible for this to work!

But this year, for the first time I saw the security crew making sure that the smaller children got to the front of that area so that they could see, and also that the children were offered water to drink whilst they were in there and out of the reach of their parents.

The smaller “active” stage is lower, so that the children really can go almost up to close to it.  At one point, a number of children – including my daughter – were allowed onto this stage to dance!

And dancing certainly was the order of the day.  We danced to the A-E-I-O-U song a total of 4 times, with my daughter having the slight advantage that we had practised the steps together the previous day!

Towards the end of the afternoon with less than an hour to go until the finale, the thunder finally arrived and aptly interrupted the Tabaluga show, whose cast were slightly caught off guard by the fact that it wasn’t their thunder sound effect!  It rained for about 10 minutes, and then stopped for all of the stars to gather on the main stage for one last dance.

The summer tour is well worth a visit.  On the way home my daughter cited dancing on the active stage with the presenters Juri and Singa as her favourite part of the day, with meeting Juri himself (to have a CD autographed) coming a close second.