Thursday, September 07, 2006
Huzzah! A Great Vacation!!
Let me start this by saying that if you plan to go to the States on vacation, you might want to make sure you have a current passport. I brought along my expired passport, birth certificate and photo ID and I wound up needing them all. At the very least you need your birth certificate and photo ID - at least until the new year, at which point you will require a passport.
We flew into the Baltimore-Washington airport the day before tropical storm Ernesto hit. That meant that our day in Washington was a wee bit wet and windy, to say the least.
We toured the Smithsonian Museum of American History and Culture where we saw things like Dorothy's shoes from The Wizard of Oz, a Jim Henson exhibit, some exhibits on America at war, and some TV memorabilia (the photo of the case includes Carol Burnett's maid costume on the left, M*A*S*H props, Fonzie's jacket and more...). This museum is now closed for 2 years as they plan to do some massive rennovations to that building.
We braved the weather and made it over to the White House before we headed to the National Gallery of Art and then the Smithsonian's Air and Space Muesum.
Essentially, we'd spent that entire first day walking. By the end of the day, our legs were killing us and we were soaked through. We kept a close eye on the weather in the hoeps that the storm would pass for Saturday...
Saturday morning we were up bright and early to head to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It was still raining off and on, but the winds had died down. Due to the weather, it was rather quiet that day. Also, a lot of the Festival was struggling without power for most of the day. I was fairly overwhelmed when we got there. There was so much to see and do that it was hard to take everything in. We spent most of Saturday shopping at the merchants stalls. There was a ton of stuff, including ceramics, jewelry, puppets, masks, costumes, walking sticks, magic tricks, games, wands, honeys, wood carving, a forge, a glassblower, shoes and more...
Sunday and Monday the weather had cleared up and things got busier. We spent our time checking out the shows, following some of the town's storyline, and watching the human chess match and some jousting. Yes, real jousting folks! Oh - and yes - there were even elephant rides there....
The jousting was awesome:
One of the town's characters, apparantly a descendant of Robin Hood (remember, this is set during the Tudor era):
The O'Danny Girls were raunchy and hilarious:
We were introduced to King Henry VIII, who was looking for a new bride (next up for him would have been Ann of Cleves):
Probably the bext act there was Hack and Slash. They had a few different shows each day and they were hilarious!
Jay got pulled up into a Hack and Slash show (involving apples and a crossbow) and I got pulled up into "A Bloody Drama" show (which required being the kidnapped maiden who saves her prince and I had to celebrate the winning by bellydancing).
Each day ended with a pub sing and it was never easy to get a good seat (although we somehow managed to anyway)...
All-in-all it was a wonderful festival and I am already hoping to get back to it next year!
Posted by Dre at 8:03 AM
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