King Arthur Festival

Even though I haven't been feeling so great lately, I had promised my girl we would go to the King Arthur Festival at the Hammond Castle in Gloucester, so we went yesterday. The weather started out cool and rainy so we decided not to dress in costume. We both have decent outfits but no cloaks or capes and that would have been a necessity on a day with weather like yesterday.
The weather is probably what kept the Festival from being overcrowded. There was a good number of people in attendance, but not so many that we couldn't move around freely. We didn't get there until about 1pm, so we didn't really follow the day's storyline too closely. What we did see was very good and the characters are always interacting with the audience between their scenes anyway, so we got to chat a little with Hazel, the court's rat catcher and her rats, Queen Bellakane (I think it was), Morgan Le Fey-- an evil queen, Mordred and one of Morgan's servants. We toured the castle, which is really an impressive structure, and watched the Phoenix Swords fire show and the end of the Human Chess Match. The weather cleared up mid-afternoon and it turned into a really pleasant day.
The food offerings were limited to one vendor selling kettle corn and another selling fried dough, hot dogs, sausages and cheeseburgers. Nothing very medieval about those offerings, but the kettle corn was tasty. There was a decent variety of vendors selling clothing, jewelry, leather goods, chain maile, weapons, hats and other objects, as well as a woman doing henna body art and another pair of vendors offering massage and reiki. I managed to keep the financial damage fairly low, just buying up a skirt catcher for myself and couple of dragon related items for the girl. I looked at capes, but couldn't decide on one. The velvet ones are so pretty, but the wool ones are probably much warmer.
I would have liked to have taken more photos, but of course I forgot to charge the camera battery and ran out of power after taking just a dozen pictures. I have posted the ones that came out decently as a set on my Flickr account, of you're interested.