We had this on again off again start to going to the Renaissance Festival. We spoke with others who recommended it, but turned out not to have actually been to one. In the end we decided to go.
Sadly on Friday morning it was raining. I finished fixing the tent after Kyisha broke some of the bendy pole segments. I tried measuring the dynamic rope as the coleman instructions said, but my marker kept on being lost. In the end I just used gut feel on the tension of the elastic. This worked fine.
After a fuel stop in Mt. Ev; We arrived at what turned out to be called Camp Eureka. We picked up our wrist bands after a little time waiting for them to find us on the list. We then headed down to the back of the site where the family camping was located.
The Renaissance Festival, as might not be expected is in fact nothing to do with some Renaissance reenactment. Rather it is a festival run as a fund raiser by the local arts community.
We put up the tent and headed up into the festival proper. Everyone was happy to be there and it was much more child oriented than we expected.
We ended up staying Friday and Sunday night. The girls were happy that there were several children’s movies, mainly by Hayao Miyazaki. The best one was universally agreed to be Totoro. After some debate Krysta declared Totoro her favourite Myazaki film. But, while I liked it, I preferred spirited away.
Another thing that the girls liked was the fire twirling. They were both totally amazed by the fire skipping rope. Though sadly I did not see it.
Teresa also made an origami pot, filled it with potting mix and planted some snow pea seeds.
On Sunday night we headed home so that we could have Easter morning at home. Though this year the girls were not as excited by the Easter egg hunt. We headed down to Anika’s new place for lunch with the Leah’s. In the afternoon we headed back to the festival.
We met up first with Mirabai and later Tamara who had arrived at the festival on Sunday.
Teresa has been developing this issue with packing up and leaving. She has become terrified of being left behind and she was hysterically wanting to go home. Some nice children were concerned by her upset and came to offer some help.
Krysta spent the Monday morning with Kirsten doing some yoga and things in addition to the wild & free dancing they had done before.
I packed up the tent as the bom was forecasting rain from 10 am. But it turned out the rain was late and did not arrive until about lunch time.
Finally we headed out and went home. Unlike previous camping trips we arrived home at a decent time and actually unpacked.
The general feeling was that the festival was better than visiting the Warburton Caravan park, less car traffic, more children’s activities and unlike New Year’s Eve, not lots of people getting drunk. The down side is no dogs.