But the faire has expanded to weekends throughout June, which means I could plan ahead–and delay if needed, which happened this year. I had decided that would be our Father’s Day outing, but storms threatened, so we demurred. But that left only the weekend of the 28th this year, so despite some trepidation about how muddy the faire might be, my youngest and I headed out.<\/p>\n
Hartville is in Amish country, so you have to be careful on the county roads out there.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/amishonhighwayc.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The shoulders of Highway 60 as it runs through Webster and Douglas Counties are wide enough to accommodate the buggies, but you have to anticipate that you’ll find one around every curve and over every hill.<\/p>\n
And, you know what? That’s normal here in southwest Missouri. A bit of hubbub has been made around how the Europeans have discovered America, again, and I get the sense that a lot of the Internet is reacting, but they’re still of their previous mindsets that there is one normal for America, but, really, there are many. And it’s interesting to experience the various normalities, and it’s kind of interesting to be reminded of what your normality is.<\/p>\n
At any rate, it was a fairly small Renaissance festival, but of course I’m comparing it to the really large on in Bonner Springs which I have attended, what, six or seven times? I went once with Scott, Todd, and Lisa; once with Mike and Scott?; once with my beautiful then-girlfriend; once with my boys, my brother, and nephew; and once with the whole family and my brother’s new wife and his old son. So maybe only five times.<\/p>\n
The parking lot was definitely muddy, but the grounds themselves were not bad. The festival featured several stages where medievally themed musical acts, with a preponderance of pirate portrayers, and magicians performed. We got roped into helping out with various tricks. My boy drew a picture on a slate along with others doing the same, and after mixing them up, the magician gave each intrepid artist his slate back. I got to help with the bed of nails bit–the magician laid on a bed of nails, and he asked me to stand on his prosthetic, weight-distributing belly. No problem, I train these balance ball drills at martial arts classes all the time. The only thing, though, is that I’m awful at them. But after a few attempts, I got up on the rotund belly to complete the trick.<\/p>\n
The booths were the crafts you would expect. The forge-and-swords tent had a couple of broadswords and a couple of small axes, but nothing I needed for my collection, which was fortunate as they were pretty expensive (although probably I’m pretty cheap). And we did stop by the axe-throwing booth, which led me to my first recent Pop Pop moment: The guy running the booth asked for my son’s name, and then he gestured to me and said, “And this is your…. Grandfather?”<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/mattdamon.gif\")
<\/p>\n
We were there under an hour, all told, and then we wended our muddy way to the highway for a return trip home.<\/p>\n
And you know what made me feel the most Pop Pop? I really wasn’t that into it.<\/em>. I won’t say I won’t ever go again–after all, maybe I’ll be able to convince my brother to meet me out there one year–and maybe it won’t be muddy, and maybe I will be with someone who appreciates the thing more than is just going but is counting the time until the next trip into the online mines.<\/p>\n Or maybe Pop Pop is just too old for a good time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ah, gentle reader, this story is already a week old, and it’s actually the source of the “Pop Pop” schtick (we’ll get to that by-and-by, youngin). But a week ago, the last weekend of June, my youngest and I went to the White Hart Renaissance Faire just south of Hartville–that is, about an hour east […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35426"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35429,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35426\/revisions\/35429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Years<\/strike> Decades ago, I enjoyed the festivals much more. I guess I was younger. I was playing role-playing games and perhaps reading more fantasy novels, so I was more in-touch with the lifestyle. I was going with friends instead of family, and to be honest, I was hoping to meet an attractive girl in period costume. A different place in my life.<\/p>\n