Renaissance Festival

For the first time ever we went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. I've never actually wanted to, because it just seemed so crowded, expensive, and giant festival-ish. But I've heard good things about it from colleagues and friends, so I figured it wasn't that horrible. Crowed and expensive it definitely was. We did get advice to go Sunday morning because that avoids some of the crowds. The crowds come a little later, but in the meantime you've had a little breathing room.

 The first thing that happened when we were there was that C8 was hungry, of course.  So we bought pretzels from a vendor. And C8 took a photo.

We wandered around a bit, watched a show, then we headed to the free pony rides in order to bypass the more expensive elephant and camel rides.

 

While in the area we found the (free) kids play area (swings and play structures) and the ($1.00) giant slide (awesome though). We did the slide once and then I think they swung on the swings for 20 minutes. Then we moved on and watched more shows.

The best of the shows that we saw was Small Medium and Large, the Barely Balanced Acrobatic Daredevils. Q6 laughed her head off watching these guys.

  

Because they were doing stuff like this:

And making very silly comments. We all loved them.

We also watched Johny Fox, a sword swallower, magician, performer.

 While watching him C8 & Q6 were biting their nails and hiding behind their snow cones. 

Unbelievably, they were still hungry, so Q6 tried a pork chop on a stick (I ate most of it because of Q6's loose tooth made it difficult to chew) and C8 had a quesadilla. And both had bananas.

The last thing we did was Jacob's Ladder. Three tries for a dollar to get to the top of the topsy-turvy ladder. Look at C8's third photo ... there are her legs to the right as she hit the hay.

   

I think Q6 really thought she was going to make it.

  

Then we saw one of these, and we had to stick our heads in. Best picture by far:

Two more pictures, just because: