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Jousting and other Ren Fair type things
I spent part of the day, at least, as the Texas Renaissance Fair or Festival or whatever they’re calling it. It was amusing. Apparently it was a Greek or Roman themed weekend, although the number of people in togas were sadly outnumbered by the number of people in Star Wars costumes I saw. I am a little confused by the presence of Star Wars costumes at a Ren Fair, but hey, if someone wants to slap on Stormtroooper armor and march around in 75 degree heat, go for it.
The shopping was interesting. I was actually planning to buy gifts for a couple people that I know go for typical fair fare: candles, wood work, leather work, pottery, etc. I didn’t see anything I couldn’t find cheaper online, though, and the one time I was in a shop contemplating a purchase, the shopkeeper came over to tell me about how this was the biggest festival in the whole world, or maybe she said the U.S. I don’t remember. At any rate, it’s bigger than California’s fair. Take that, California! And it rakes in millions of dollars. And then she proceeded to tell me that she only ever sold the item I was looking at at this fair, no where else. Well, that explained the price on the item, clearly. Not only was it priced exorbitantly because it was at the fair, but she must have tacked on more for being exclusive to this fair. You’d think shopkeepers would save their gloating until after the purchase was made. I declined to buy and went off looking for somewhere else to spend my money.
I did eventually find a gift for the last person on earth I ever expected to find a fair-style gift for. And it was even reasonably priced, or at least didn’t make me wince when I paid for it. I guess this means I’ve officially begun Christmas shopping.
But possibly the most amusing part of the day was the joust. It was… hilarious, actually.
See, my family lived in England for a while when my brothers and I were just at that age where fair style things were the best ever. And England can put on fair style things like no one else can, and they have lots of them going on. At real castles. With real dungeons. And we used to watch the jousting exhibitions, because I liked the horses and my brothers liked the fighting.
You can see where I might have had some high expectations, right?
Yeaaaaaaah. Yeah. Erm. It was, you know, moderately entertaining, in the way staged entertainment can be.
And there was no question it was staged. I’m all for safety and don’t even mind choreography, because fairs should be fun and not Kiddy’s First Lessson in Spinal Cord Injuries, but when one of the riders shifts his lance out of the way three strides before impact and turns the shield so the other rider can oh-so-carefully aim and smack it… there’s such a thing as being too obvious.
Even better were the falls. The jouster gets hit… canters for two strides in a perfectly balanced position, tosses his lance away, and does a flying dismount. Even the ten year old kid in front of me was pestering his father, wanting to know why the rider had jumped off his horse instead of continuing the joust.
The warm-up games were more impressive, actually. One of them involved the jousters trying to catch an upheld ring on their lance, like this:
Then they graduated to throwing the rings up in the air. Hey, I was impressed.
Sorry, that’s the only picture I have—apparently, I have awful timing when it comes to taking action shots, and my camera was too low on battery to try taking video and abstracting photos later.
The one good thing about the jousts was that they were relatively short; they weren’t running the horses into the ground for peoples’ amusement, which was especially nice since they do several shows a day (maybe… I think one rider, at least, changed horses between shows, but I can’t be sure since they were all covered in curtain thingies).
All in all, not a bad way to spend a sunny, fair weather day.
And on the way out, I passed some random lady riding around on a Friesian. The horse gets major props for practically falling asleep while a family tried to get up the courage to pat him. The horse was a whole lot less intimated by the fair than people were by him.
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On Nov 13, 2008, Linda -The Mane Point said:
Never been to a Ren Fair, but it sounds like fun.
FAREWELL TO A FRIEND, on THE MANE POINT