A Day with Monkey at the Medieval Fair

Today we ventured out to Morrisburg to visit Upper Canada Village and check out the Medieval fair that was here for the weekend. Monkey and I linked up with the B family while mommy and Big C stayed home so that he could nap after he'd already been to swimming and fun church. We arrived at the gates at 2:05 and were told to hussle back to the Medieval Fair area as the last jousting of the day was to start at 2:15. We made it in plenty of time and found a good spot.
The jousting stuff was actually pretty cool. There was a lot of showmanship (read half an hour of lead-up stuff before they actually got to jousting) which was well received all around. They started by introducing everyone and our section was to cheer for Sir Timothy of England. Cool.
The boys were impressed with all of the armour. Here's one of the knights up close.In terms of the action, the kinghts all started off by spiking a lance into a bull's eye on a bale of hay. Our guy won, so the kids were ecstatic.
Next came the 'slice an apple of the head of a subject'. Paul and I weren't sure how the summer student missed seeing this as part of his summer job, but hey - 10 bucks an hour is 10 bucks an hour. The first two knights womped the poor guy on the side of the head, but here's the third knight slicing the apple clear in half. It was quite impressive to do this with a full sword at a running gallop. Next came the actual jousting. It was pretty cool I must say. The 3rd and 4th place knights from the first 2 competitions squared off and did pretty well. Then our knight and the 2nd place knight took centre stage. There were some impressive smashing of the lances, like this one that I captured on the camera and uploaded all by myself to the blog.

After this we were off to the rest of the Medieval Fair. The boys were drawn right to the trubuchet exhibit. They made a little castle wall and had 3 catapults lined up in a row to shoot at them. The boys each launched 3 rounds of golf balls at the windows of the castle. It was a hoot and Monkey and E-man tried tirelessly to get one in. Monkey was sooooo close so many times, and then this happened:



I think that the video says it all.
The boys checked out the knights fighting with swords. We also checked out the swords that they had for sale. Please note that neither boy came home with a sword. CHEO is already busy enough. They did however pose with their swords for some photos.(more on this to come...I took lots and lots of photos)