Going to get Medieval

This past weekend (Saturday), I made an appearance at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. This is apparently a fairly big deal. It runs every summer for every weekend in June and July. It's in the middle of nowhere, but setup much like a theme park (minus the roller coasters). Lots of eateries and show stages. It was an experience to say the least. Most interesting were the people who attended and dressed up in Renaissance garb (not workers, but guests).

In addition to doing my fair share of people spectating (NOTE: the fashion police could have had a big day), I went to several of the shows. In order of preference...

Grape Stomping - This weekend was sponsored by some winery, and as a part they had a grape stomping competition for a free trip. This might have been fun to participate in, but made for a boring spectator event.

Jousting - Not as cool as it sounds. It was a lot of talk for a few minutes of guys on horses hitting each other with sticks. Again, sounds cool, but very anti-climatic.

Barely Balanced - A group of three people that do balancing and juggling stunts. It was impressive, but nothing super special. During one the girl made a mistake and burned off one of her eyebrows (only funny because she wasn't truly hurt).

Arsene of Paris - This was comedian/illusionist/mime. He was pretty funny. The majority of his humor was picking on the audience, so it was fun to laugh at other people (I wasn't picked on). He was French and a mime, so he's lucky to be this high on the list.

Iris and Rose ("Wild and Thorny") - These were two comic-singers. Their show was very much adult content (ie. their humor focused exclusively on adult situations...if you know what I mean). However, they were relatively clever about the material though. If you were Scottish, you may have been offended about their portrayal of your relationship with sheep.

Ded Bob - This was a comedic act in the style of a ventriloquist (ie. a dummy performed the show, but the handler had a mask, so I can't promise he wasn't just talking). The dummy was a skeleton. It was very funny. I laughed a lot. The act used a lot of audience participation. Very humorous.

Those were the things I saw. I ate a Turkey leg (good, but a lot of work to get the meat off). My big complaint would be pricing. It was $16 for the ticket, each show passed the hat around after and food was priced like fair food (more expensive than needed). I didn't give to the performers due to the high base ticket price. Still an experience and a fairly good day.

HA! I posted twice in just a couple day span...enjoy.