Renaissance Festival

I remember going to Scarborough Renaissance Festival when I was younger and it was always so much fun!  People dressed up and acting so differently.  It was always like walking into another world.

Last year Morgan, Blake and I went and I was MISERABLE!!  I should also mention that it was in the high 90's and I was pregnant.  Not a good combo!  So, this year we decided to give it another try and to take Sam with us.  We went pretty early as to avoid the larger crowd and also to try and beat the heat.  It was really humid but bearable.  I will go ahead and say that this year was much better.

First thing we did was warn Sam that if she misbehaved she would go straight to the stocks.

We did a round of the whole place first to get our bearing straight and figure out what we wanted to do.  We got several offers for our "midget" or "small human".  After reassuring them that they would want to give her back in a few hours they subsided.

Next, we went to the Birds of Prey show.  I always love these types of shows and watching the beautiful birds.  We were fine most of the time but the poor guy running the show kept asking us to keep our "small animal" very still so that the birds wouldn't try to attack her.  This was NOT working for poor Samantha but she did pretty well.  We finally found one way that she was happy and relatively still:

We eventually found some lunch and we all enjoyed loaded baked potatoes.  Morgan and I had sweet potatoes, fully loaded with cheese, sour cream, bacon and broccoli.  This was a combo that I'd never had before and I wasn't to sure about it at first but it turned out to be pretty good.  Blake had a regular potato with the same fixins.

Next was the amazing turtle races.  We watched these last year as well and the guy that does them is hillarious!  We even spotted a pirate in the audience :-)

The turtles are in the middle circle "getting psyched up"

Spot the pirate!

Turtle Man!

He can fly!

And they're off!

After walking around a while longer we eventually had decided that it was time to go.  It was getting crowded and the sun had finally come out and zapped all of us.  Before we left however, we had to get an Italian Ice.  These are SO good!  It's half of an orange topped with the yummy desert.  We got strawberry and Sam loved it:

This place is THE place to go if you like to "people watch" like we do.  People dressed as elves, wenches, queens and kings, fairies, pirates and we even saw a ninja.  We probably won't go next year as nothing really changes from year to year.  This is definitely something we will take Sam to again when she's a little older.