Welcome my Lord, to a kingdom of fantasy and empty wallets!

Saturday, August 29th.  I wake up with a purpose.  I wake up with a renewed vigor and zeal for being a geek.  I wake up… To go to the Greater Pittsburgh  Renaissance Festival!  I know this makes me into some sort of übergeek, but something about trumpets heralding my family’s arrival to a little wooden village straight out of the middle ages makes me get far more excited than I should be for the Money-spending Fest. After being delayed by about 30 minutes to get my morning WoW addiction of fishing dailies in and a short 40 minute drive, we arrived at the Kingdom.

Upon arrival, shit got wacky immediately.  I found my four friends who had arrived hours ahead of us, and we sat down to watch one of those crazy funny medieval themed comedy troupes.  I sit down, turkey leg in hand (What Ren Fest is complete without roasted turkey legs, after all?) to watch a friend of mine get pulled up on stage and dance with the troupe.  They appeared to be doing some way shortened, paraphrased comedy version of Romeo and Juliet.  We laughed, we cried, we threw up all over ourselves.  All is merry and good until I look to my left, and what doth appear to mine eyes?  A pile of human feces.  Lovely. Seems some Renny couldn’t be bothered to make it allllll the way to those bathrooms twenty feet away.  Time to move on to the next event!

My little baby stole my turkey leg! Gah!

Or so we thought.  The rain clouds had other ideas  and by other ideas, I mean soaking us to the bone for no fucking reason.  I managed to get under a tent and because I had the baby with me, I was justified to laugh at my wife and friend as they got stuck out in the rain.  Well, they didn’t get stuck in the rain so much as stubbornly refused to seek shelter because it wasn’t “medieval” enough.

Wet wife and friend. Yes, he has another turkey leg.

As soon as the rain let up, my friend Dave (The turkey leg guy) and I engaged in a competition of epic proportions.  Axe throwing, knife throwing, shuriken throwing, one of those strength contests with the hammer and the bell and finally archery.  Dave took axe and knife throwing, still convinced he hacked though.  I carried the strength and shurikens to victory.  The final event was archery.  Now, I played a Hunter in WoW for some time, so I figured myself to have an edge in this event.  I was wrong.  Twenty-five arrows a piece.  We shoot at a fake deer target.  Dave takes an early 6-2 hit lead.  I managed to tie it at 6-6, but with his last arrow the bastard made it 7-6 and with my last arrow, I failed to connect, labeling me the loser of this little set of Geek Olympics.

Next up was the jousting show.  This has always been one of my favorite parts of the festival each year, simply because I am a giant dork and can’t get enough of people sword fighting and jousting on horseback.  I won’t go into great detail since this is mostly a visual and spectator sport, but I did snap what I think to be one pretty awesome snapshot of the event.  Ignore the lame people in front. (Sorry if those people are reading this)

Reminds me of that bad NES game.

Now comes my absolute most hated and at the same time most anticipated part of the Ren Fest, or any convention type deal for that matter… The BUYING SHIT phase.  Everything is so god damned expensive.  A lot of it is worth the prices people ask for it.  Most of it, however, is not. We checked out everything from medieval jewelry and peasant clothing to cloaks, hats and some kinda weird ass perfumes and soaps made from animal oils and parts or some shit.  Kinda gross, but it smelled OK, I guess.  I ended up buying a slick little walking stave with a skull carved into it from a very reasonably prices, high quality vendor.  So I got to indulge myself by pretending to be some kind of level 80 Geek Mage.  Worth the $20 if you ask me.

Then comes the absolute worst kind of vendor, in my mind.  VERY nice quality products.  But very overpriced to boot.  So you hate their prices, but cannot gripe about them so much because the quality is so damn high.  Bah.  It was a clothing shop, with everything from pirate garb, to the corsets and dresses and shit girls dig.  I tried on a Jack Sparrow-like pirate jacket and managed to snap a photo wearing it, though I found out shortly thereafter that photo taking in this little shop was VERY frowned upon.  Whoops!  The jacket turned out to be $325, a bit pricey for my blood, though I really fucking want it, so I may go back next weekend and just bite the bullet and get it. Very likely, actually.

Sticks and stones, luv.

The last booth we hit was a place called La Forge, you guessed it, a weapons shop.  The guys owning and manning this booth were perhaps the nicest we encountered during the entire day. Offered us deals on pretty much everything we wanted and their stuff was super high quality steel, forged by hand.  Lifetime warranty.  Good shit, anyone who goes to this particular Ren Fest needs to hit them up.  I ended up purchasing more of a show-piece War Pick than one of the live steel, battle ready weapons.  Will end up right above my desk, very soon!

I refuse to call it a Warhammer. Fuck Warhammer.

Well, that above does it for THIS weekend at the Ren Fest.  Oh, I will be going back.  I need that pirate coat and I need more steel, dammit.  I also plan on getting way to drunk next time I go.  Perhaps before I go to the archery stand.

Have a great Thanksgiving break!

[/caption] Here's some reference if you don't know what I'm talking about.

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