Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged sterling renaissance festival
Busy Busy August
Jul 29th 2009
Well, it seems like August is shaping up to be an extremely busy month for me. He's a rundown of what's going on (so far) this month:
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August 4th – Progressive Nation 09
First up on the list of August events is a concert. Specifically Progressive Nation 09, featuring Dream Theater, Zappa Plays Zappa, Bigelf and Scale The Summit
I'm pretty excited about this show. It's been a while since I've gone to a concert first off and second the new DT album is extremely good which always makes me even more excited. Finally, I've been listening to some Bigelf and Scale the Summit and I've been pretty impressed with what I've heard. There was a change in the openers, but I can't say I'm terribly dissapointed with the end result.
- August 9th – Sterling Renaissance Festival
I had originally not planned to go to the Sterling Renaissance Festival this year, but my sister contacted me recently and she really wanted to go. So plans were made for us to go either August 9th or August 16th depending on if it's going to rain either day.
Hopefully we get good weather as I'm really looking forward to going. The two weekends are themed as Gypsy weekend which is new this year so it'd be neat to go see it and Wine Lovers weekend which will work out as well.
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August 15th – Family Gathering
Instead of doing a christmas eve party on my mom's side of the family this year, it was decided to instead move the traditional family gathering over to the summer and head out to the official family campground, Whetsone Gulf State Park.
This is another "I hope we get good weather" event, but I'm hopeful it'll work out. It'll be nice to get together with everybody and hang out. With the option of getting away and wandering the park for a bit if necessary too. Should be a fun time had by all, assuming of course that the weather cooperates nicely for us.
- August 28th - The State Fair
Yet again my friends and I are planning to hit the state fair. This year though we're going out in the afternoon (after lunch) hitting all the building stuff, just eating dinner there and then exploring the wine tasting stuff in the evening. Last year we discovered we really liked it when it was getting dark out and the crowd was thinning out so we're planning the trip to avoid some of the crowd. Yet again, I hope we get good weather this year.
This also helps mitigate a bit of the costs of going considering we're there for less time and eating less of the overpriced (but tasty) foodstuffs.
To The Alehouse!
Jul 28th 2008
This weekend was lots of fun, and I didn't even do anything I was planning on doing Friday. Everything sort of changed mid-stream. My plan was to spend the weekend cleaning up my apartment, doing a major clean type deal because it really needs it, going over to my friends for a little while on saturday. However, all of this changed when i got my replacement drivers license in the mail on Saturday.
I usually go to the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY every year with my sister, but she ended up not going this year for several reasons. My friends (Jay and Wassy) were going on Sunday, but I didn't really want to spend the money since we were going to be doing the state fair at the end of August, and I wanted to save money for that. However I did really want to go this year since they got a new owner and had a lot of improvements.
I had settled on not going though…until my drivers license arrived in the mail. Which means I could also partake in some of the consuming of spirits, which was all I needed to push me over the edge of going, so we rearranged plans and they swung by Sunday morning to pick me up and off we went.
We arrived promptly on time, no thanks to the GPS continually falling off their windshield (I need to get the weighted mount thingy for it…), got our hands stamped and started wandering around the shops a bit. My friend Jay wanted some coffee so we stopped by one of the vendors to grab one but they had a little problem with their coffee machine. So what started out as a quick coffee pitstop turned into a 10 minute coffee wait. I had to take a picture of the cup of coffee so that it will be preserved for all time. And it is there to the left.
After the coffee we headed to catch the rat show which I saw last year and my friends hadn't seen. It was as good as I remember it being and my friends enjoyed it too, which is also a plus. After the rat show, the pubs had opened, so we took a little break and had some lunch and mead/beer depending on who you were (I went with the mead).
We wandered on over to where one of the new attractions was, some acrobat type people who put on a really neat show. The pictures don't really show how high they were but they were high enough where a fall would hurt a good deal, but not high enough where they could right themselves to land on their feet if they did fall. Thankfully, nobody fell and the show was really quite interesting. I hope they're back next year.
After that things got a little fuzzy as to the order of things. There was some wandering around, I caught another show which my friends weren't terribly interested in, but I thought was good. Another stop at the pubs and I tried some draft cider this time which was good (And if anyone was wondering, yes there was water for me sprinkled in with the drinking to stay hydrated and all that). There was also a stop at the archery booth for the necessary bit of archery. I did ok, but my friend Jay ended up doing better (after nearly whacking himself in the face with an arrow which deducted major points). I stopped taking pictures at this point because I was just relaxing and having too much fun to think about it.
Towards the end of the day we went out wine tasting at the booths outside the show. We eventually ended up spending the most time over at the Thousand Islands Winery booth where we were guided through their selection by a entertaining and nice man who was also wearing no pants. Their wines were awesome though and I ended up buying two bottles, one of a Niagara and one of a dessert wine called Seaway Blues which is a blueberry flavored wine which I was surprised that I liked more than the Strawberry that I tried.
After that we went back in and wandered for a bit more but eventually we grew tired and made the trek home. All in all, I'm very glad I decided to go as the day was just perfect. Good weather, good company and a good time.
Unfortunetly…now I keep thinking it's Sunday because I usually don't do anything major on Sundays and have another day of the weekend to get through before I have to go back to work
Please Don't Make Me Climb The Hill Again…
Jul 31st 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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