Edit 09-05-13:  Added a few more notes and one more picture.  Huge renovation, I know 🙂

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It was close this year.  Very close.  We slid in just before the doors rumbled shut, with time enough to grab our hats and not get our hands crushed.  What with life and stuff, and other things, my friend and I really thought this would be the year we’d miss Ren Faire.

And then, suddenly, she texts me — Want to go Monday?  So we made it for the final day of the Faire:  Labor Day Monday.

We got there later in the day this time, because I wanted to see the Danse Macabre that was supposed to happen closer to closing time.  In the meantime, we caught a bit of this group called VaNa MaZi in the Traders Wharf area, did our usual shop crawl (one of my favorites is always the chime shop.  I love listening to those magical ringing tones–the twinkling little ones that make me think of fairies, and the deeper, more mysterious, almost more mystical tones of the larger chimes…), and costumed-people-watched.  I feel like I saw a lot of Goth, fairy wings, and those beaded hip scarves for belly-dancing.

Anyway…

Here’s me sort of pretending I’m October Daye.  She’s…um… undercover at a Ren Faire in Southern CA, to find out what happened to a pair of fae who used to run one of the vendor stalls.  She’s not exactly digging the outfit May put together, but whatever, as long as she has her coffee.

I, on the other hand, happen to like my outfit very much.  The tunic I found at a local fair trade store, while the crown is the same from last year.  Of course I’d pick the one with yellow, green and red ribbons.  In fact, it does kind of look like the kind of crown that would go with a Lithuanian folk costume.

Anyway. . .

We met this pair at the outskirts of the crowd surrounding the big Drum Jam, near the end of the day.  They were kind enough to let me take this picture and share it here.

We also met a faun, who sometimes wandered about the Faire grounds playing his pipe, and sometimes took a break to juggle.  He didn’t speak; he wouldn’t even shake or nod his head in response to a question.  Instead he would smile, shrug, reach over to shake a leafy twig…  Some children standing near us said they understood his language.   Just as my friend and I were moving on, he tossed me a shiny sequin.

And we did catch bits of the Danse Macabre —

A line of dark, hooded figures passed the picnic area where we were having some fried cheese balls, and then there was the cluster by the Wishing Well, where we were hanging out after the Drum Jam.

Finally, it was 7:00, but people took that more as a guideline than a rule, and the Faire officials didn’t seem in any hurry to herd us out.  There were crowds still hanging around the Drum Jam area for at least another half hour, I think, meandering very slowly toward the Entrance doors.  It was a very nice, laid-back sort of atmosphere.