Catching up again... Dave's birthday was the 8th, and we surprised him with a little overnight trip up to Tennessee (he loves roadtrips, especially impromptu ones). We found an interesting place to go. A little backstory: A couple of months back, we were driving to Murfreesboro, TN, and we saw this CASTLE up on a hill. I tried to get a picture of it on the way back from the highway, because it looks so cool up on the hill, but this was the best I could get. You can see the top :)
We looked it up on my phone and found out it was an actual castle and someone lived there, and that they had a festival there every May... so when I thought about surprising Dave with a fun getwaway, I remembered this and looked it up again. He had said we HAD to go there when the festival came up.
But first, we headed off after Dave got off work on his birthday, and drove most of the way up (to Franklin) where we found this cool little artsy mall where this guy lives: Rusty Mechanism. The mall was converted from an old factory, and it was an amazing place.
We had dinner at a fun little Bistro there before driving over to our hotel for the night. The boys thought that alone was a really fun adventure. When we were getting ready to go on the trip, all I told them was that we were going to stay at a hotel (didn't want them to mention the castle and give away the surprise!) and Ben was really excited. I wasn't sure why, until he told me it was going to be such a fun adventure because "anything can happen at a hotel". The way he said it, I realized that he had connected it with the hotel in "Bedtime Stories" (which we have seen many times, they love it). Unfortunately, (just as I had feared) it was not a good night's sleep. We'll have to work on sleeping away from home. What a long night.
In the morning we had breakfast at the hotel and went for a swim before heading out to the festival. Dave had no clue where we were going, even when we got there (you couldn't see the castle from the festival grounds, you had to take a bus across to the castle for the tour). I had to tell him why we were at a Renaissance Festival :)
We toured the castle first, it was quite fascinating. The man who built it has been working on it for something like 30 years and it's still not finished with it. He welcomes everyone personally and tells them a little about how he came to build a castle, it's pretty interesting. He has tried to keep the design authentic and has made and collected a lot of things that he has on display as you go through. The grounds are beautiful, and the area across the way where they hold the festival is awesome.
Everything was scattered amongst the trees. The woods were beautiful and green and lush. A bit muddy since it was a rainy weekend, but we didn't get too much rain while we were there. It was fun, there were lots of people in costumes, interesting vendors, lots of music and people in costumes (as well as in character) all around us. We even saw some people who had gotten married there that day.
The boys had fun, there was so much to see. They were a little tired from our night away from our beds, but they did pretty well, all things considered. It was a fun trip!
0 comments:
Post a Comment