Archive for July 31, 2007

I haven't posted in a few days, I know…But I have good reasons!

First…Sunday I spent the day out in Sterling, NY at the Sterling Renaissance Festival with my sister. We've been going every year for the past 3 or 4 years (I forget). It's a lot of fun usually and this year was no exception. It was Pirate Weekend, but unfortunately, there wasn't as much pirate happenings as their normally was. I actually noticed fewer performers walking the streets and talking to people than there were in past years.

The fun started early when I got to my sister's place at 7 and knocked on the door…no answer. Knocked again. No answer. I was afraid that was going to happen since her AIM away message still said something like "Goodnight!" I figured she was sleeping. So I called her up. She had just woken up. Good thing we built in some extra time. We still got there really early.
The shows were good, but it was really hot when we had to sit in the sun. Wasn't so bad in the shade though, and there was a nice breeze blowing through at times. We also discovered the secret of getting drinks: there's one drink vendor towards the bottom of the hill that's not quite as busy as the other ones. The title of this post actually, is in reference to the giant freaking hill this thing is built on. Everything you want to see is always up the hill, no matter where you are. It's very strange.

We were afraid that they weren't going to have their normal opening ceremony, but that was only a misprint in the schedule it seems, which was good…I guess because I was called a squinty eyed pirate during it. Arrr.

We hit up some of the normal shows, like Daniel, Duke of Danger (a grown man trying to hurt himself in amusing and misguided ways) and Don Juan and Miguel (two shows of comedy, adventure and sword fighting this year) which were good. We also saw some new stuff, such as Emrys Fleet's Rat Extravaganza!  Which was…odd…very odd. Indescribably odd, but funny. At one point my sister turned to me and said "Why is this funny??" while she was laughing. That was probably the best part of the show.

We also went to see Giacomo The Jester and his juggling, magic and rope walking act. He was really funny. Stole a shirt off a guy in the audience in order to work one of his magic tricks. Before the show, he also balanced the pretzel rack (there were street vendors wanding around and selling pretzels, cookies (which were AWESOME this year) and nuts before the shows) on his nose because the pretzel guy said that he would do it during his sales pitch. I was too slow to get a picture of that, but we were sitting close enough where I was afraid I was going to get a face full of pretzels if he dropped it.

We skipped the Joust last year since you usually need to get to the show at least 30-40 minutes early to get a seat in the shade, but this year since some of the stuff we normally like seeing wasn't there, we had some free time to get there early. The picture on the left is kinda hard to see unless you click in since my camera phone doesn't have an optical zoom. Takes good pictures though I think. Beats the heck out of my Treo in any case.

We did some browsing of the crafts and arts while we had some open time, but I didn't buy anything… some interesting stuff there though. I want a giant dragon fountain

Then there was the games. We braved the maze they have set up there. My sister beat me through. I think she cheated because she didn't take any wrong turns. Boo! Then she beat me at archery too. It wasn't my day for games it seems.

So that's it for the Renaissance festival. Oh yes…what was my other excuse? I mentioned two… Well, before and after the festival, I was a little busy because my sister had dropped off…

It was a really satisfying ending to the series, to me. But I'm going to leave it at that in case somebody stumbles onto this without having read it.

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