Faire Day! So exciting! I don’t know why I get so excited to go to renaissance faires, I’ve been to many before and usually they’re all about the same, but the ambience! The atmosphere! The potential for purchases! Mmm the best! Jess and I were, once more, up fairly early. About 7am Colorado time but 9am our time so I went looking through our suitcases to find the pieces of my outfit Jess had forgotten to set aside for the morning, specifically my belt and socks. The belt was in her suitcase but the socks were, for some reason, in mine even though all the socks we packed otherwise were in her suitcase. Weird.
We were up and wandering around all together around 9am Colorado time awaiting Frank’s arrival at 9:30am. I cracked open the Nitro Cold Brew (Dark Chocolate Sweet Cream) we had purchases at Walmart on the Energy Drink Run as my fun morning coffee drink as I sat and read some of my book at the kitchen island. MY outfit was pretty simply to throw on, black skirt, white top, belt, boots, necklace. I didn’t have purple contacts for Yennifer so I just did a layer of purple eyeliner and figured that would do. Jess had a little bit more to do, blue top, black pants, corset, boots, arm bands, and wig. She elected to just wear black sneakers instead of the boot as her feet weren’t doing to hot from all the walking we’d already done, and she saved the arm bands and wig for the faire. Frank pulled up at exactl 9:33am, which we knew because that was also his estimated arrival time! He took Jess and my suitcases and Jess with him, while I rode with Dave to pick up his friend Jesse. We stopped outside her place for a hot second to wait for her while I attempted to give a summary to Dave of ‘The Old Guard’, a movie and comic series I quite like but which I discovered is almost impossible to summarize in 30 seconds (the alloted time Dave gives on to pitch him a book or movie one has said they enjoyed).
Jesse came down and she was such a delight from the moment the door opened! I felt, vauguely, like Dave’s weird kid sister who’d been permitted to join he and The Most Popular Girl In School on their personal trip to the faire. Not in a bad way, very much in a good way! I like being around people who are more fun and interesting than me! It means I don’t feel pressured to be more fun and interesting to try and uphold a conversation or keep things going! We chatted and laughed and had a grand old time as we drove the 40ish minutes past Castle Rock to the Larkspar fair grounds. Jess and Frank were supposed to stop at the outlet mall and get Jess and wig cap but they missed the exit and as it would have been a half hour detour at most, they elected to just skip it and go without. We heard all this on the phone call they gave us as we waited in the car-line for parking, which spanned about a half-hour wait on it’s own. The wait wasn’t bad on our side of things at least, as Jesse, Dave, and I just kept chatting and time passed pretty fast!
We finally arrived at the parking gate, discovering that the other route into the parking lot had actually no line at all and we could have gone around, but no changing things once they’re done! Frank and Jess were only about 12 cars behind us so as soon as we parked they found us and Jess and I finished getting ready. Jess had to get her hair set and put the wig on, and I needed to unbraid my Tentacle Braids and brush them into their nice little waves. As I finished we pulled out the spray-on sunscreen and Dave offered to hit me with it. How nice! So I pulled my bangs up, closed my eyes, and he got RIGHT in my face and somehow managed to get the sunscreen on and in my right eye. Like a lot! I took a minute or so to try and let it cry itself out so as to preserve my makeup but it was still watering even as we left the parking lot to take the long walk to the faire grounds. I figured it would clear up soon enough. I was wrong. So very wrong.
There was a tram to the grounds but it wasn’t SO far a walk that we wanted to wait or deal with it so we kept walking the 5-10 minutes to the front gate. As we walked I helped Jess put on her arm bands and Dave suddenly realized, like many other attendees it seems, that his phone doesn’t have any service and he had to go to the will call area to see about getting his information looked up to get printed tickets. While he did that my eye streamed tears. I looked like a sad Two-Face with one normal side of my face and one side just aggressively sobbing. I continued to try to preserve my make-up by simply dabbing at my eye with the cuff of my shirt but it really wasn’t doing too much. In the midst of that, Jess and I hit the ATM and got an extra $60 in cash just so we had it. The ATM only had a $2.48 service fee which we agreed wasn’t too bad. Then we hit the bathrooms right next to the ATM station, which also sold faire related merchandise, and I attempted to dab a wet paper towel to my eye to see if that helped. It did not. Jesse had been offering me eyedrops for some time and finally I took her up on it and dropped a few in. It soothed my eyes for a minute or so but before long it was back to streaming. I think if I had had a chance to just lie down and not open my eyes for a little while it would have gone away faster, but instead I was in the sun walking around a dusty fairground for the next few hours.
We finally headed in, Frank, Jess, and I a little before Dave and Jesse as they also elected to hit the ATM station before entering. Once inside we were advised by Jesse to pull the old “EPCOT World Showcase Mexico First” which is a fancy way of saying “When you enter a park, go left not right”. In EPCOT people generally do the World Showcase from Canada to Mexico because it’s just human nature to go right to left, and also because if you’re doing Drinking Around The World the drinks are stronger in Mexico so people don’t wanna start drinking there. The drinks are also, however, bigger and better and Jesse agreed with us that one of the Triple Tier Margaritas in Mexico will last you the entire trip through the Showcase so it’s fiscally better if you’re just looking to drink and don’t care about variety. She just really GOT us, ya know? Jesse told us to go left in this instance, however, because the better shops were, according to her, on the left side of the faire. She’s been many times so we trusted her judgment. I didn’t really see too-too many of the shops, however, as my right eye didn’t want to stay open but also couldn’t stay shut, so it was doing this weird twitchy, squinty thing and still, of course, watering.
Jess and I have been looking for two things at every faire for the past few years: A Renfri broach from The Witcher for Jess’s Renfri cosplay, and a really nice stick incense burner for my tarot table. We did not find either. Foiled once again. We did stop into an incense place right away and they sold these really interesting bottle incense burners but they just weren’t my style. The shop attendant, however, noticed through my sunglasses that my right eye was Going Through It and offered me two paper towels to try and get the sunscreen out. At that point I decided to forgo the makeup and used a mirror in the hat show we hit next to wipe anything I had off, except my lipstick, and see if that helped. Then I folded up one of the paper towels into a little square and put it under my sunglasses, hoping it would keep my eye shut long enough to heal as it was clearly super inflamed. Dave felt bad initially, of course, but seeing the make-shift eyepatch really did it for him. He was so apologetic but it really was an accident, he was trying to be helpful and do my sunscreen for me!
I had told Jesse early on that Jess and my primary goal at any faire is to just wander around and look at shops, but if she had any shows she’d like to see we could do that. She seemed more than happy to just wander also though, so wander we did! We checked out a handful of shops before we found what would be one of many food and drink places and the crew got in line for drinks. Jess handed me the purse and told me to go get some food, whatever looked good. The lines in that area at that time were insane though, but the kettle corn vendor’s line was nonexistent, so kettle corn it was! Got a big King Size bag for $9 and headed back. Turns out the line they’d been in didn’t sell mean though, which was what Jessica wanted, so we found the correct line for mead, whichw as shockingly small, and got one of each of their options then found a nice shady picnic table to sit and drink and eat. I really respect how renaissance faire goers have no qualms about table-sharing. Mostly in America even if one member of a party is sitting at a table, that table is taken. Completely taken. But at faire any open seat is up for grabs, we get real European about sitting close because everyone understands that it’s hot and we all just want somewhere to sit. So we table-shared a nice large picnic table as we got some liquid in our system. Jess and I both agreed we liked the Honeysuckle Mead the best and Jesse shared some of her soda with me because I said I was gonna go buy one, which was very nice of her. I took some of the ice from the cup and wrapped it in one of the paper towels and placed it on my eye, which was now super red and still, somehow, crying, as we stood up to head out again.
We ended up immediately finding a coffee stand so Frank and I got iced coffees. They coffee was ok, definitely just chilled hot coffee and not cold brew, but it was iced and caffine-y and it looked very cute inside my cheap blue water bottle so I was satisfied! At this point my eye had actually started to clear up, ice it seemed had been a very good idea and if I had known earlier the problem was no longer the sunscreen but the inflammation then I would’ve gotten an iced drink way sooner! But it meant my vision was now much better to look around a little loose leaf tea shop. As Jess was perusing I saw they sold a black tea called Wonderland and Jess agreed we had to buy it! So Jess told the guy at the stand she wanted it and she pulled out her cash and he grabbed a bag and then… wandered off. Frank had been telling Dave, I believe, about using tea leaves in alcohol to dampen some of the bitterness and this guy seemed to think that conversation was way more interesting than accepting money for his goods and just went right over to talk about it. Jess ended up getting asked by the other person behind the counter if she needed help where she was like “...Yeah, Wonderland, I’m trying to buy Wonderland” and she finally got her tea but like… Bruh she had cash out, don’t walk away! Who does that!
We meandered quite a bit after that, popped in and out of a bunch of shops. Dave and Frank both did some hot sauce tasting and Jesse joined them at one point for a sampling of some Slusharitos and we caught portions of the Jaques the Whipper show as we made our way to the rock climbing wall. Frank wanted to do the middle wall, which you could do for $10 and if you reached the top, won $25. You got three tries and it seemed like fun! We left Frank to have that fun though and we all just stood by to watch him and cheer him on. We chatted with another spectator as he climbed and she told us that she’d only seen one person reach the top today and that was on the wall to the right of the dead center. So it’s a pretty tough course, which makes sense as the company obviously wants to make profit not pay out. Frank didn’t make it to the top, but he did make it a little over halfway which was pretty good considering it’s a course designed to be just almost impossible! We got some more food a little after that as we discovered another food area with much shorter lines. Frank, with a little wandering, discovered a pulled pork sandwich line that had no one in it so he stepped up, ordered one, and had it in his hand in less than a minute! When we went back to where Jesse and Dave were standing we told them about the no-line line and Dave was like “Pork sandwich! Hell yeah, I get one!” and he too discovered the excellent, prompt service of that station! As the crew waited I went to the bathroom and refilled the water bottle. There was a water refill station right next to the bathrooms but the line was insane and I reasoned that if the water refill is right next to the bathrooms, then the bathroom sinks were almost definitely the same water. So I just filled mine there and headed back to once again do a table-share and eat. Jess got her and I a Da Vinci’ Meat-A-Ball Sub and Frank got a wine and hard cider for us and we sat and ate and listened to some bagpipe group do their thing on a nearby stage.
Dave and Jesse went off on their own for a bit to find the roasted cinnamon nuts vendor and we wandered to explore shops a bit more before meeting up again not far from where we’d left each other. We looked into a pretty cool mug shop that sold really fun stoppers for mugs, like lids but made out of cork, that came in all kinds of sizes to fit all kinds of cups and mugs and I thought those were super neat but decided I didn’t need one. We also found a whole-bean coffee stand and I made a purchase of some Burundi Fiddlers coffee which sounded like it had good notes! While there some woman came up and really matter-of-fact asked the guy working “Where’s this coffee source?” in reference to the same one I had just purchased. He said, plainly “Burundi”. She went “So, South America?” and he had to be like “No, East Africa.” Now, I didn’t know where Burundi was until he said it either, but I know I don’t know geography well and certainly wasn’t going to pretend to be some kind of coffee expert. I left after he spoke but I was busy chuckling to myself as I left because wow, that was so embarrassing for you ma’am. Take it down a notch next time. After that little ha-ha it wasn’t long from there before we ended up back near the start of the Faire and Dave and Jesse said they were all good and would leave us there. We said our goodbyes, took our obligatory Faire Selfie, and off they went. We didn’t stay much longer though, maybe another half-hour to forty-five minutes as we used the bathroom and saw the shops we’d missed on the way in. We ended up in this cute little fairy shop and I elected to purchase a little sticker for the water bottle and a little Fairy Catching Kit that looked like a flower growing out of a watering can. Was too cute to pass up and I think it’s got good chances of surviving the flight.
We made the long walk back to the car after that purchase and drove the maybe 20 minutes to the Hilton Garden Inn Jess had made reservations at. We got in, took a little nap while Frank went to check out some rock climbing gym in the area, then all got together again around 8:30pm to get Olive garden for dinner. I got a Shrimp Alfredo with a Chicken and Gnocchi Soup, Frank got something that’s like a sample plate of a couple of their pasta dishes and ordered with it a to-go Fettuccini Alfredo for Jessica to have in addition to the Italian Salad she got. The drive over was pretty quick and the woman who gave us our order told us she “Loved our energy” which was pretty sweet! Back at the hotel Frank went to see about getting a little swim in before the pool closed at 10pm and Jess and I watched Beat Bobby Flay as we ate. The food was excellent, as always with Olive Garden, but we didn’t finish most of it. Jess ate her salad and saved the uncooked to-go meal for the following day and I really only had half my pasta and soup. We’re big grazzers and we tend to eat less on vacation for some reason. Just get full faster I guess. Dave’s fridge is probably still full of the food we didn’t finish from the brunch and dinner. Had we more time there we would have finished it over a period of days, but alas, in Dave’s fridge they remained.
Jess returned to her room when she heard Frank returning from the pool and I was left to get ready for bed. I thought I was going to get ready sooner but I ended up casually munching on my food, watching HGTV on the floor until about 1am. I knew Frank would want us up at some kind of human hour to start doing things so I finally got myself off the floor to get ready for bed. I didn’t know what the plan was for tomorrow at all really, aside from a potential hike, but I figured I’d want a good nights rest after the long day at faire.
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