Sherwood Forest Faire

I would not consider myself a Rennaissance Faire person per se, but I do enjoy the food and beverage and costuming. I was pretty intrigued when my roommate invited me to go last weekend, and with her friend who has a campsite and goes every year no less!

The Sherwood Forest Faire is one of the bigger ren faires in the country, and certainly blew the last one I went to out of the water. Sherwood Forest is located in McDade, TX, so about an hour away from Austin. We were also incredibly lucky to be able to go last weekend, the COVID-19 pandemic was just starting to escalate and shut things down in Texas. I heard the faire was trying to stay open in spite of Coronavirus because the money the vendors make is their main livelihood they can’t get back.

Anyways, let’s pretend the world isn’t possibly ending, and move on with what we did and what I enjoyed!

We started with food, a beverage and watching the juggler. The drink of choice at this faire was called a Bee Sting, which is mead mixed with cider. Holy hell that drink is delicious and dangerous! I got something called a “Hufty Tufty Baggins” which were chicken salad egg rolls (not really sure what you would describe them as actually). Only because I wasn’t sure when I’d ever have the opportunity to eat something that weird again. They weren’t bad!

The juggler has a very entertaining show where he juggles fruits, swords, a flaming torch, etc. A pretty standard busker’s show overall.

After we were done eating we basically just walked from shop to shop. There were more shops than I could’ve possibly had time to see in one day, and bars conveniently spaced one Bee Sting apart from each other. I looked at swords, axes, quills, corsets and elaborate leather with fur trim capes:

It also felt like there were a good number of activities to partake in. We saw games, like this one, that’s remeniscent of a manual version of an arcade game. We watched these two guys try to get through the whole course. The other side of the ball-in-the-hole board was WAY harder.

We meant to circle back and try the game ourselves, but we got distracted (read, drunk on Bee Stings) and ended up watching jousting, then the Washing Wenches show, getting some more food, meeting up with a friend of my roommate’s friend, meeting the owner of an establishment, and I got to shoot a bow and arrow!

They of course have all the other activities you might expect - hair braiding, henna, face painting, axe throwing etc. So you can find something that’s up your alley!

Because the friend-of-my-roommate has a campsite at the faire, we simply walked over and had a few more drinks around the fire before we called it a night.