When Natalie and Emily were little, Grandma came out to North Carolina to visit and one of the things that we did was to go to a Renaissance Festival. It was one of the neatest things I have ever been to and I always wanted to go back. This year I learned that there is a RenFest that takes place just outside of Nashville every May, and since I was turning 40 at the end of the month, what better way to celebrate my old age than to go back in time.
The kids were all excited about the idea and Natalie and Brandon even decided to dress up. Of course, we didn't really have any medieval costumes on hand, so Natalie wore her dirndl and Brandon wore some kind of fantasy mash-up involving a thermal shirt, shorts, long socks and a vest. Originally he had on an elven cloak, shin guard guantlets and a faux chain mail hood as well, but I talked him down citing the hot weather as an excuse.
We set out on what was supposed to be about a 90 minute drive in very good spirits, but about 2 miles before we reached our destination, the little two lane road we were on became a virtual parking lot. The traffic was bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. It took us only a little while to realize that all this congestion on an out-of-the-way country road on a Saturday morning was not due to spring road construction or a fender bender near the flea market. All these cars were headed to the same place we were! The festival had run all through May, but it had been rainy every weekend until this one, which also happened to be the last weekend of the fair, which also happened to be Memorial Day weekend, which also happened to be the first weekend of summer vacation. It was like the perfect storm for crowds.
We tried very bravely to have a really good time but it wasn't easy. The place was so packed that I was worried one of us would get swept away in the crowd and lost. We watched a magician and some jousting, tried some archery, looked at lots of weapons and fantasy-type crafts, stood in line for an hour to get some lunch, and saw some gravity defying cleavage and a lot of tattoos. Brandon and Bryce loved that we saw several people dressed up as characters from the Legend of Zelda fan universe and Mark even broke down and bought Brandon a set of elf ears.
We didn't see nearly all the things that we had planned on watching, but after a couple of hours of fighting our way though the crowds, we were all just ready to get home. It wasn't a bad way to spend a 40th birthday, but it certainly wasn't as fun as I had imagined it to be. I guess that's true about most things in life though.
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