For decades, the middle two weeks of summer sounded the same from anywhere along the western edge of Windsor Woods: the whir of a Ferris wheel motor carrying over the tree line, the smell of funnel cake drifting off Edwin Drive, the low murmur of a crowd that had driven in from well outside the neighborhood. That sound is gone this year. The Mount Trashmore Summer Carnival, a staple for decades at the park that forms Windsor Woods' own western boundary, will not return in 2026.
The end came in stages. The 2025 carnival shut down after just three days when the city cited staffing shortages, including a lack of public safety officers, and safety concerns following a 2024 shooting in the carnival's parking lot that killed a teenage girl and injured a young man. A city spokesperson later confirmed the ride would not come back at all this year, offering no single reason but noting that the park would have "a full schedule of events planned throughout the summer" instead. Mayor Bobby Dyer, defending the earlier shutdown, put it plainly: "We're sorry that we had to close down a business that wanted to do business in Virginia Beach."
That is the part of the story that made the local news. What didn't make the headlines is what actually replaced it, and that replacement tells you more about how the city now wants this park to run than the cancellation itself does.
What's Actually on the Calendar Instead
Rather than one operator running a multi-week midway, the city built out a run of single-day events spread across nearly the entire year. Several have already happened by the time you're reading this. Others are still ahead.
| Event | Date | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Rising Sun Pow Wow | May 16 | A celebration of the Nansemond Tribe and Native American culture, with a Grand Entry procession, drumming, dancing, and craft vendors |
| July 4th Celebration | July 4 | The city's annual Independence Day gathering |
| Summer Bash | Aug. 8 | A single-day summer festival |
| Sand & Surf 5K/10K | Aug. 9 | A run and walk course through the park |
| LigayaFest Filipino Festival | Oct. 24 | A Filipino cultural festival |
| Autumn in the Air | Nov. 7 | A one-day fall festival |
| Electronics recycling drop-off | Nov. 21 | A community e-waste and paper recycling event |
Every one of these is free, city-run or city-partnered, and contained to a single day. None of them requires the kind of nightly, weeks-long security staffing that a traveling carnival midway does, which is likely the operational math the 2025 shutdown exposed in the first place.
The Shape of the Change Matters More Than the Loss
Read that list end to end and a pattern shows up that the cancellation announcement never spelled out. The old carnival was one long, high-density event parked against a residential neighborhood for weeks at a stretch. The new calendar is the opposite shape: shorter, more frequent, and tied to specific communities rather than a generic midway crowd. A tribal pow wow in May. A distance race in August. A Filipino festival in October. Each one draws a different slice of Hampton Roads for a single afternoon or evening, then the park goes back to being a neighborhood park.
For someone who already lives along Loch Haven Road or Level Green Drive, that's a real change in how the year at Mount Trashmore feels. Instead of tolerating or avoiding one loud, crowded, multi-week stretch every summer, residents now get to choose into a handful of smaller, more specific days throughout the year, or skip any single one without missing the whole season. The park's giant playground, skate park, and lakeside picnic areas are also simply available and quiet on all the days in between, which wasn't true when a carnival was running every evening for weeks.
The Part That Never Needed Fixing
None of this touches the other anchor a few minutes from the same stretch of Windsor Woods: Bow Creek Recreation Center on Club House Road. It's a 67,743-square-foot LEED-certified facility with an indoor pool that includes a sprayground, slide, and diving board, a double gym with basketball courts, and a full slate of drop-in classes including Zumba, Pilates, TRX, yoga, and Les Mills BODYPUMP. None of that runs on a seasonal carnival schedule or depends on a private vendor showing up each May. It's open on the city's regular hours, every week of the year, carnival or no carnival.
That's worth sitting with. The piece of Windsor Woods recreation life that made local news this year was the one that depended on an outside contractor and a multi-week footprint. The piece that didn't make news is the one that just works, day after day, because it was never built to depend on either.
What's Actually Within Walking Distance
The stretch of South Plaza Trail that runs along Windsor Woods has its own small food cluster, and it's worth knowing by name rather than category. Jerrrk Time Caribbean Cuisine, at 3540 S Plaza Trail, runs a Trinidadian-influenced kitchen built around jerk chicken, curry goat, and oxtails, generous enough that a single order regularly stretches into two meals. A few blocks down at 152 S Plaza Trail, Plaza Jamaican Restaurant serves the same oxtail-and-rice-and-peas tradition with its own following. And at 4541 S Plaza Trail, near the park entrance, Jollibee brings its Filipino-style fried chicken and Jolly Spaghetti to the same corridor, a fitting neighbor given that LigayaFest lands at Mount Trashmore every October.
None of these existed because of the carnival, and none of them will disappear now that it's gone. They're the kind of businesses that keep running regardless of what the city schedules at the park down the street, which is exactly the point.
The Real Takeaway for Anyone Already Living Here
The carnival's exit isn't really a story about losing something. It's a story about a neighborhood park trading one high-risk, high-density event for a slate of smaller ones that fit a residential border better in the first place. If you live in Windsor Woods, that means more chances to show up for something specific throughout the year, a recreation center that never blinked through any of it, and a food strip on Plaza Trail that was always worth the walk.
If you're weighing a move into this part of Virginia Beach, or thinking about what your own home here might be worth in a market shaped by details like these, Just Call Coco knows this neighborhood block by block. Let's Connect.
