Know your own URL

This weekend jmaynard spent a couple days at the Des Moines renaissance faire. One of the vendors there was Summerset Winery. Neither of us had any wine, but some of their wares caught my attention and I asked for a business card. Alas, they had no cards or none with them. I was given their URL.

I was told www.summersetwinery.com (and I double checked that I had the name right) which is not what is really desired but a somewhat spammish site that has a bunch of semi-related links. That's why I did not make that link clickable: Whoever it is, they don't deserve the traffic.

Doing a bit of searching I find that www.summersetwine.com is their real, useful, site. By mistakenly giving me the wrong URL they nearly had me write them off as being too spammish to do business with.

Des Moines Renaissance Faire

As mentioned earlier, jmaynard and I spent a couple days at the Des Moines Renaissance Faire. We arrived in the early afternoon on Saturday and looked around a bit, and were greeted by various folks we knew. One was Sauboo the troll who we hadn't seen (and he hadn't seen us) in some years. He commented by now lower weight which made me feel good and bad. Good that there is a noticeable improvement and bad as I'm up several pounds from where I was last November.

The place felt crowded. Not that as in crowded full of people, but rather cramped with all the buildings in a fairly small space. That's probably historically accurate, but it's not what I'm used to from other faires. WiRF is downright spacious in comparison, for example.

We spent quite a chunk of time with irpooh and foolscap001 and eventually made arrangements with them for supper. It might say something that we probably had more fun with them at supper than we did in our time at the faire on Saturday, although it was a rather short time that we were at the faire.

We went to faire on Sunday, arriving maybe an hour after opening. We had both decided that we didn't need to see any gate show. We saw a few acts. Generally folks we knew, or had known from a few years ago, but not necessarily with the same acts of course. It was odd, though. Everyone we knew and met seemed happy, but somehow it didn't feel quite right.

There was a joust. Or there was supposed to be a joust. I was standing the back of the crowd for a bit and then wandered around. I figured I simply wouldn't see the joust and that wasn't a big deal to me. But evidently nobody else saw a joust either. One mare decided that she just wasn't crazy enough to do that sort of thing. I only saw one of the three times she dumped her knight. Not threw, dumped. Jay saw all three.

There is, for lack of a better term, a certain "vibe" to a good faire. The feeling that everyone actually wants to be there and it isn't just putting in time. That it's a sort of party and you're invited. That wasn't there at DMRF. It wasn't as absent as it was at some faires (IRF and the Des Moines "Fall Faire" of a few years ago) but it was.. well, it just had that feeling of almost.

A few years ago on a now defunct web-board a few folks, myself included, came up with a sort of checklist or two for renfaires. Things to do, and things not to do. Jay and I couldn't really find anything that lept out at us as a big "FIX THIS" about DMRF. There were things that could be tweaked, sure, but no worse than many other faires that have the odd issue that needs addressing. So there is something intangible or that we just didn't see. But talking with a few other folks, we weren't the only ones to pick up that something was only almost.

Is DMRF outright bad? Well, we've certainly been to worse. But we don't see any great reason to go back. It just doesn't compare to Siouxland or Sioux City or WiRF.