The Bay Area Renaissance Festival
I have been wanting to go to a Renaissance Festival for as long as I can remember! For the majority of my life, my family has lived overseas so there wasn’t many (if any) opportunities to go to one. When we moved to Florida, we looked up local events in our area and found that Northeast Florida has so fun festivals! There’s a festival for pretty much all interests. We hope to go to the World’s Strongest Man competition and MegaCon later this year, health and social distancing permitting.
The Bay Area Renaissance Festival is held in Tampa, FL. It’s been running for 41 years and is an amazing festival for families! It has a little something everyone. We went on the Highland Games themed weekend so there were kilts, highland games events like caber toss, highland dancers and music, and a kilt competition.
Sometimes festivals are geared more towards adults, but there was plenty for our 4 year old to do too! There was a kids play area and several things throughout the grounds that were kid-friendly. My husband hadn’t seen jousting before so we enjoyed several jousting matches while we were there too. There are tons of shops selling wares and food. Most of them took credit cards, but I like to bring cash just in case. There are a lot of overhead trees for sun coverage. But it’s still Florida, so we definitely packed and used sunscreen as well.
The grounds can be fairly dusty (I feel like it adds to the ambiance), so I’m glad we all wore boots. You don’t have to dress in costume at all. But I definitely had a LOT more fun dressing up! There is a costume contest, so if you do enjoy costuming, that would be a great event!
The festival was a really awesome time all around! I know that they put a lot of work into making it a really enjoyable experience for everyone. We really enjoyed it and can’t wait to go back next year!
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