{"id":8501,"date":"2013-11-13T00:44:58","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T05:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=8501"},"modified":"2013-11-13T00:46:01","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T05:46:01","slug":"carolina-renaissance-festival-huntersville-north-carolina-2-3-november-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=8501","title":{"rendered":"Carolina Renaissance Festival, Huntersville North Carolina: 2 & 3 November 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I'd heard the radio ads for the Carolina Renaissance Festival<\/i> for years, but somehow never got around to going until the start of November. For one thing, I wasn't quite sure where Huntersville was (answer: just north of Charlotte), for another I didn't know if there would be enough there to be worth a weekend.<\/p>\n

In the event, I was quite pleasantly surprised. The place is a couple of miles east of I-77 and has an interesting air of semi-permanence<\/i> about it. The parking lot is obviously a pasture or some such non-graded space, and the buildings are all open to the air with porta-johns providing the facilities, but yet they are<\/i> permanent structures, and the festival is now in its 20th year.<\/p>\n

The crowd is an interesting mix. There are the standard parents-with-kids families out for a day of face painting and low-tech carnival rides, then there are the Society For Creative Anachronism<\/a> types, the \"healing crystals\" and New Age crowd and the Celts and fairies crowd. One comic storyteller commented that there was a lot of crossover with engineering and science-fiction fandom types (and indeed SCA is strongly correlated with SF fandom..) such that he could tell Rene Descartes jokes (\"Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks him if he wants a beer. 'I think not', says Descartes and vanishes..\")<\/p>\n

The show people were great. Everyone had a line of patter to draw in a crowd (the fire eater: \"I'm not that good. Come watch me, I might hurt myself!\"), and kept up rapid fire comedy bits while swallowing swords (\"You can only swallow a sharp sword once!\"), walking the tightrope, abusing the peasants or juggling.<\/p>\n

It was also a \"something for all ages\" event. As I mentioned there were plenty of kid friendly activities, but there was also a bit of a bawdy side for the grownups at events labeled LC (\"loose cannon\").<\/p>\n

Here's a few videos.<\/p>\n

From the sublime:<\/p>\n