’Twas 1534, and after the longest of years, the vile plague had finally lifted from Queen Mary’s Land. Relieved, my band of merry adventurers set off in search of a hearty feast, and the company of our fellow travelers, whom we’d so sorely missed during the Dark Days.
Well… no.
This was just last year, actually.
But everything else is true.
See, even though a traveling circus stays on the move, the wheels never turn quickly. Last fall, my fellow carnies and I found ourselves in the nation’s capital once again, undergoing all of the necessary preparations for yet another long-term overseas engagement. One weekend in particular, having already burnt through the standard fare of overcrowded Smithsonian museums and overblown presidential monuments, we cast our gaze beyond the District’s borders… which is how we came to stumble across a website for the 2021 Maryland Renaissance Festival.
Re-energized, we loaded the coach and headed north, the trusty GPS plotting a course towards Annapolis. I used the time on the road to research our destination, and found that the Maryland Renaissance Festival was the largest, longest-running gathering of its type in the Western Hemisphere. But after continuously operating every year since 1977, in the fall of 2020 “Ren Fest” had been left with no choice but to pull up its drawbridge, just another casualty of the Coronavirus pandemic.
But by the fall of 2021 the situation had greatly improved, so by the time we pulled up to Revel Grove, several hundred costumed visitors were lined up at the village gates. There seemed to be more than a few regulars in attendance, all of them pining for their yearly dose of medieval revelry. The mood was light, and so we happily joined the queue, handing over our admission tokens to the gate guards before transporting ourselves 500 years backwards in time. And from the moment we entered the Festival grounds, we were not disappointed.
The artisan shops.
The games and the jousts.
The endless people watching.
And of course, the food!
Now, I could go on at length about Ren Fest…
…or, you could just buy a ticket and go experience it for yourself.
The Maryland Renaissance Festival is set to return to Revel Grove in 2022, every weekend from August 27 until October 23.
So what are you waiting for?