Lords and Ladies, Welcome to Ye Old Maryland Renaissance Festival

G’dday ladies and gentleman, and welcome to the Renaissance Faire of ye olde!  Jk, I’m not going to type the whole post like that.  Mostly because I had to think even long and hard about that one sentence!  But I wanted to share with everyone the fun we have at the now annual Renaissance Fair escapade!  My sister has gone with some of her college friends for a lot longer than I have (this was only my second year).  But now that I’m in the area, I get to tag along, and also provide a place to crash!  It’s a ton of fun, and T and I even got dressed up this year, and convinced one of my sister’s friends to join us in ye old garb.  I don’t have a picture of A’s newly purchased outfit, but here’s T’s and mine!

Let’s start with the basics–the festival is located right outside of Annapolis, MD, and has free parking!  Woohoo!  It runs from the end of August to the beginning of November, and is a pretty huge fairgrounds from what I’ve seen.  There’s so much to see–the elaborate costumes, the things to buy, the kids shows, games to play, and food to eat!  I’ll spend a little more time on the latter part since this is a food blog, but I will note that our annual trip at the end of September to the Bloomsburg Fair in PA is more for the food than this one is.

We basically browse the fair and wander around nibbling on munchies as we pass and decide they look good.  I started off the day with mini corndogs, because obviously that’s a breakfast food.  And we were waiting for R to get some coffee anyway, so why not eat?  They were okay, but in my opinion needed a little more salt and were actually lacking in flavor.  And A got the crab pretzel which is a DEFINITE MUST!  We earmarked it for later and got our own.  It’s really just that–a soft pretzel topped with what’s akin to crab dip and cheese.  It’s actually surprisingly not as messy as you would think, and delicious to boot.

Throughout the day we munched on other things like cheese bites (square mozzarella sticks), meatballs, curly fries, crabcake sandwiches, key lime pie on a stick, peanut butter pie, and even fried mac and cheese!  I’m sure I’m forgetting other things, but there you have it.  Notably, the fried mozzarella bites were really good, maybe because there was a higher cheese to breading ratio, and the mac and cheese bites reminded me quite distinctly of the ones you can get from Sheetz.  They’re straight up kraft mac and cheese, but fried into little triangles.  Definitely good, but I think they’d be even better if it was a homemade mac and cheese!

There’s also a lot of access to alcohol at these events, and with the heat you definitely need to remember to drink water, regardless if you drink or not!  However, if alcohol is your jam, there’s at least 7-8 beers on tap at most locations, mead, wine, and cider, not to mention a few special drinks!  They have raspberry wine which if you like sweet is 110% the way to go.  There’s one location that also offers blueberry wine, and while A and my sister like that even better than the Raspberry wine, it didn’t taste altogether much different to me.  They also offer “snake bites” and “bee stings”, one of which is beer and cider, and the other of which is cider and mead, not that I can remember which is which.

There are tons of things to see and do, and it’s definitely a kid-friendly place!  A lot of the shows are geared toward a little bit of a younger crowd, though we still pause and watch them when we pass.  The jousts always do draw huge crowds, so definitely stake out a spot if you want good seats.  We actually skipped the first one because we didn’t grab seats early enough, so made it to the second one like half an hour before hand and got some great views.  The jousts do the typical games of grabbing rings off posts via lances, and throwing spears, but they actually do legitimately joust!  Splintering lances and all!  Though I always feel bad for the riders and horses in armor and decked out in the hot sun.  They of course don’t try to de-horse each other, but there’s still plenty of action to satisfy everyone, and is a bit more legit than say, Medieval Times (which is fun in it’s own right).  But Medieval Times I see more as a staged fight, whereas this was a little more authentic in my opinion.  Medieval fantasy novels were a lot of my childhood growing up!

Definitely an A+ weekend, and I’d say there’s a pretty good chance we’ll go back with some local friends before the end of the summer!

Maryland Renaissance Festival
Maryland Renaissance Festival Website
1821 Crownsville Rd
Anapolis, MD 21401

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