A local schoolteacher and his wife gave up their day-jobs and decided to start their own Renaissance Festival.  Half of my mind thinks this is the silliest thing I ever heard and the other half of my mind wishes I could quit my job and start my own Renaissance Festival too.   So of course I went, and I took the girls with me.

It was pretty good, for their first year!  There were pirates and fairies.  There was archery and boffer-sword fighting.  There was a guy dressed as a dragon, with an ice-cream cart.  There were tents full of beribboned bodices and leather belts and drinking horns and “pixie in a jar” kitsch for sale.  There was lemonade and roasted turkey-legs.  There was quite a lot of good music. But the best part was the Pirate Kissing Booth.

For a dollar, you could get kissed by a pirate.  The girls were totally horrified by this idea, so of course I went straight to the “Kissin’ Boof” and paid them a dollar happily.  Of course I didn’t actually get a kiss – I got a dollar’s worth of hilarious Piratical theatrics and a handful of Hershey Kisses – but it was very funny.  And…  the pirate slipped me a note, informing me that for a mere five bucks I could have anybody at the festival Kidnapped By Pirates!

So yes, of course I had the girls kidnapped.  The pirates arranged with me to wait until the girls were alone, shopping, and then they evidently told the girls they had an “audience with the Queen….” I waited about ten minutes and then “found” them, locked up, next to one of the tents.  I gave them a hard time:  “I leave you alone for one minute,” I scolded.  “What would your mothers say?  What, you think just because someone says the Queen wants to see you, that’s it’s ok to just go off with Pirates?”

I had to pay another dollar to ransom them.  Best Renaissance Festival ever.