vakkotaur

The Martin Luther College Renaissance Faire was today. My folks are visiting this weekend so they could attend this faire. When that was first suggested I was concerned they'd come a great distance for very little.

We got our start a bit early, which was good as I either misinterpreted the MLCRF web site's map or didn't make the same assumption. Following its highlighted route from Hwy 15 might work, but not from the Hwy 15, or the part of Hwy 15 (I'm not sure) we drove in on. I drove though New Ulm ("Sleepy Eye 11 miles") and turned around. The real directions from Hwy 15 from the south are: stay on Hwy 15. Turn right on 1 ST NORTH and go a block (or is two?) but then turn left when you see a city park. Find a place to park.

The parking is free. The admission is free. The event is put on by a group associated with the Martin Luther College, and it's rather Ars Gratia Artis. There were a few vendors. A couple jewelry vendors, a few leather goods vendors (which amazingly didn't overlap product - different specialties) and a kettle-corn vendor. There were also a couple food vendors but I got the impression they were part of the MLC group.

There was a stage which faced away from the rest of the event, which made drawing a crowd a bit tricky, but it was for good reason. The park has a terraced hillside there which makes an ideal place for an audience to sit. The weather was good, if a bit windy, so the ground was at worst slightly damp and cool. There were performances and contests scheduled throughout the day.

Before things got started, and they seemed to start a bit late or at least fuzzily, there was a sound system going. However, the audio was music that one might expect to hear (foolscap001 might quibble, but I've certainly heard worse) at a renfaire and it wasn't obnoxiously loud. And once things were nicely underway, the audio system was shut off or at least left dormant.

The food concessions, such as they were, were sort of out of the way and easy to miss. That resulted in our walking downtown a bit for lunch. As we were dressed for the occasion (MCLRF) we got a few looks and a couple questions. What food there was at MLCRF was good, but the event is a small one and thus the selection understandably limited.

The one performance group I've seen elsewhere was My Lady's Cutlass which put on one of the better shows, having had more experience than most folks there. At one vendor's booth I found that I'd encountered them before but not like this. It was their first time vending. I heard another describe MLCRF as a nice dry run to check thing out for the season before doing a bigger event.

Sales were slow (I gave one place their first sale of the day - and that was after the walk downtown for lunch) and things were pretty easygoing. My mother commented on how different the feel was from MNRF. It wasn't that MLCRF wasn't a permanent faire site, or was small, but that it wasn't a constant hard sell. MNRF is a walk in a mall. MLCRF is a walk in the park.

We left around 2 PM and so didn't stay until close at 6 PM. That 6 PM close isn't entirely accurate. While everything else ceases and the vendors start tearing down, at 6 PM is when the big event of the play (Taming of the Shrew being this year's play) begins.

I'm glad I went. It was a nice start to the faire season. While there wasn't much there, what was there was right, or at least not wrong. "Not wrong" might sound like faint praise, but after so many times of seeing folks not manage to get to "not wrong" this was nice.