Winter is Coming

 

 

 

Just a short blog post today. The title of this post 'Winter is Coming' is widely recognised thanks to the popular TV show 'Game of Thrones'. One day while exploring Bunbury we saw a poster with this catchphrase so continued reading. It was advertising a medieval/ Game of Thrones themed night to be held at the Dolphin Discovery Centre. According to the flyer, our presence was requested for a night to 'Enjoy Mistrels, mock battles, fortune teller, music and entertainment, spit roasted meats, & period themed food, mead, dark ale, spiced wine'. All of this caught our eye and we decided to go. We went opp shopping for our costumes and off we went.

The reason this caught our eye was because while we were in USA in 2014 we were lucky enough to get to go to a Renaissance Fair (regretably we didn't write blogs while we were overseas). These are huge events and everybody gets into the spirit of things right down to accents, catch phrases such as HUZZAH (an excited expression of hooray), and elaborate costumes. The thing we most enjoyed though was the taste of mead, a wine made from honey. It is beautiful and sweet. Cameron and I love honey and wherever we go, we try to source out the local honey. In search of the yummy mead, we often ask if anyone supplies it, or know of anyone who makes it, but so far we have not found any as good as what we had in the states. So in actual fact, is was the mead that caught our eye the most on the poster. What we had was nice, though more like a cider than a wine. It was from a NSW company, but since we have learnt that there is a vineyard in the Margaret River Region that produces it. Some point soon we will get down there to try it, and tell you all about it.

The night was appropriately cold, but thankfully it was not raining as it had been all week. We spent most of the night around the fire. There was a crazy 'homeless' person walking around with no shoes or socks on all night. He was actually a volunteer for the Dolphin Discovery Centre and performed some acts to help raise money for the centre by lying on a bed of nails, then later having one of the knights smash a besa block over his stomach! OUCH!

The entertainment for the night was a company from Perth called House Darksun. They performed as knights throughout the evening. We got to watch some mock battles between them, cheering on the favourites. They were actually called slaves and 'sold off' to the highest bidder, and ultimately the winner, (not the slave but slave owner), won a bottle of wine. This is from House Darksun's Website to explain more about what they do: Members have the opportunity to train with medieval weaponry, attend local, national and international HEMA tournaments and provide entertainment at medieval fairs and school demonstrations.

All in all it was a fun evening. We did learn of a bigger event to be held in York (East of Perth) later in the year, so we may attend this too.

Happy Travels

 - Jeni