OK I will stop whining now. More about the Celtic Festival

I told you about my journey to get home on Saturday, after the Festival, but I didn’t give you much info about the Fest itself.

We own a miniature horse, Bravo, who is a therapy horse. We work with the organization Minis and Friends (this is a 501c3 organization so any donations to them are tax deductible) which has a website at www.minisandfriends.org (go figure). Since this is a non profit we use a lot of guerilla tatics to get the word out about what we do, which I will talk about in the next post. One of those guerilla tactics is to go to any public display or festival that we can go to. Our interaction with the public seems to help us get more invitations to go to places and sometimes it gets new members so that we can widen the area that we can help. We went to this festival as a group and tried to make our presence be known.

We set up at the east end of the fest, right between the Kelpie Dance Stage and the Viking Invasion. Awch! Those painful memories of the Viking Invasion. I found an interesting article about the Vikings in Ireland at this website http://www.yourirish.com/vikings.htm what a great name for a website.

The Viking re-enactors came up from San Antonio, and they really made me nervous. Several times through the day they would do some simulated duels and battles. These folks, men and women, had steel swords and wooden shields. As they were swinging these hunks of metal and wood around the contact was full force. The audience would ooo and ahhhh, and the mothers and fathers of teenage boys would cringe, hoping that the child that they had raised to the ripe age of at least 12 to 13, was not watching. Each of those boys thinking things like “I wonder where I can get a sword like that”. “Why do they wear gloves, I won’t let them hit my hands”. “Wow, I could take that guy on without a shield”. “I wonder why they say we can’t run with scissors, isn’t that sword just half of a pair of scissors?”

It was a great show, and the master of the ceremony always made it a point to tell every  body how much the groups practice and how they prepare.  My son of course heard, “We get to go out and sword fight every week.  We do battle!  We live on the edge!  We celebrate the warriors who live long lives!”  I heard, “We stretch, we run, we exercise we check our equipment.  Then we do slow motion battles, then we do a gradual increase in speed so that no one gets hurt.”  My son heard “WE ARE INVINCIBLE”.  Or something like that.

There were men in kilts tossing the caber, and throwing hammers.  There were family tartans, and there were herding dog demonstrations.  There was a guy dressed up like a tree, it was eerie, creepy and really cool.  He was about 10 to 12 feet tall, moved very slowly, and spoke with a voice modified to sound like, what I think, a tree would sound like.  It was really neat.

My Son and Mr. Tree at the Austin Celtic Festival Nov 7, 2009

My next post I am going to talk a bit about the wonderful group of people and the mission of “Minis and Friends”.   Then I will get back with you some more about the Celtic Festival.  There is so much to talk about, and still try to break it up into articles less than 600 words.  I am a lot like “Flo” in the Progressive Insurance commercials, “I once didn’t speak for almost 12 whole minutes.”  The reason I say that I am a lot like “Flo” is because, well, I can’t make even that claim.  My brother and sisters would agree with that.