The good guys in full battle attire. To be picky, this was supposed to be the renaissance but the armor and especially the helmets were more late 13th through 14th century types, but I would have to be an awful geek to point that out. Right? So I won't point it out.
...and the bad guys. Frankly, the bad guys looked better, but we were still sitting on the "root for the good guys" side. The elder of the two good guys even tried to pick Grace out of the front row to bestow a favor on him during the preliminaries, but Grace got shy. [Bummer, because the "favor" she would have been given was almost identical to the real flower wreath on her head in a prior post. (Why accept something for free when you can make dad buy one for $20 an hour later).]
After a bunch of verbal jousting and hurling of insults, the knights got down to business. It was unbelievably cool to watch these horses charge back and forth at each other at a near-gallop. They had stage prop lances which shattered in a million pieces when the struck an opponent's shield. For the big battle "TO THE DEATH!" we actually had the Queen of England in attendance, which would be important later...
Once all the lances had been turned into kindling, the knights conveniently knocked each other off their horses and continued the battle on foot with swords and flails. The bad guys continued to cheat, throwing sand in the eyes of the good guys and using other such dastardly tricks. Good guy on left, bad guy on right.
When the bad guys (who had been pretending to be Scottish in honor of Scottish weekend) had the good guys seemingly on the ropes, they revealed that they were actually working for the King of Spain and charged the Queen's grandstand along with a bunch of yellow and red clad foot soldiers who had snuck up through the audience. There were explosions and smoke at this point, which freaked out Julia and had her bolting for the exit. So I saw, or half-saw, the final bit while chasing a 12-year old up the aisle.
The good guys rallied, just about everyone died, and the battle came to its gory conclusion when the elder good guy cut the throat of the main bad guy, shooting spurts of blood all over the place. Grace wasn't crazy about the big finale, and I have to admit the violent little scene and overly huge gout of blood was more than I was expecting. I thought it was fine but wish I knew what the kids were about to see.
By the time the battle was over it was near 7pm, and the kids were tired. We had about and hour and a half ride to get home, so we packed up and headed out.
It was a really nice day. We saw several good little shows, a fantastic joust production, loads of nice costumes, and had some good food and drink. The weather was perfect; the temperature was great for wandering around without being too hot or too cool. The costume part isn't really my thing, but I understand and appreciate it. I am positive that there are people that have the Season Pass and come here a lot, dressed in various costumes and hanging out with their like-minded friends. More power to them, as they collectively create the flavor of the whole spectacle. I would imagine that only a fraction of the people in costume are actually employed by the Ren Faire, and without all the others it certainly would not be the same experience for people like me and my family who just want to go and gawk at the sights. There was more to do than we were able to in a 6 or 7 hour period, so I would not be averse to going again at some point and trying to do some of the other things we missed. And I positively wouldn't mind seeing the joust again.
Nice write-up. This is something we talked about doing for years (basically from when Ryan learned about it until he went off to college.) Sadly, the years have passed, and we've never been there.
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