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| Enter another world through the looking glass... (photo: mine) |
Last year was our first visit to the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Annapolis, and we enjoyed it enough to return again this year. The Festival runs annually on weekends in August through October and recreates an "English Tudor village" full of shops, food, stage entertainment and events (like caber tossing and jousting) on about 25 acres of hilly wooded area. According to the Festival's site, it has "more than 1,300 participants and 280,000 guests per season."
Because we'd been before, this year was less about trying to see it all and more about enjoying the things we enjoyed last year and catching a few things we hadn't before. Like last year, I particularly enjoyed the folks who dressed for the event:
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| a highlander with his cell phone (photo: mine) |
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| revelry and fun (photo: mine) |
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| folks carried around mugs and steins to enjoy the various brews (photo: mine) |
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| these girls sat behind us during the jousting exhibition (photo: mine) |
We watched a jousting match again:
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| Jousting (photo: mine) |
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| Jousting (photo: mine) |
And we caught a caber toss competition for the first time. (Basically, the contestants lift a 100-150 pound log, run with it to build momentum, then toss it into the air so that it flips over and lands with the bottom end away from the tosser and the top end facing him. Quite a display of strength.)
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| Caber tossing (photo: mine) |
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| marionettes outside one of the shops (photo: mine) |
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| a clown on stilts (photo: mine) |