Scottish Highland Festival

Knowing we were going to Homosassa Springs on Monday, we changed our mind about going to the festival Sunday and decided to attend the Scottish Highland Festival on Saturday to give us a day of rest in between.  As you can see only Amber dressed for the occasion.

We had very little in the way of expectations and as a result I think I we had a very enjoyable time.  There were a lot of vendors selling various Scottish sundries from food and drink, to jewelry, to clothes, but that really was not an interest to us.  What was nice was that there were at least three music stages set up in such a way that they never competed with each other yet you could almost always hear one playing no matter where you were at the festival.  I so enjoy Celtic music that this was a really nice back drop to our day.  Amber too enjoyed the music and would spontaneously stop and wiggle occasionally.

The first event we watched was the Australian Sheepdog Sheep herding demonstration with real live sheep!  The dogs are amazing.  Watching the interaction between handler, dog and sheep is something to behold, at least for me.

I think the boys enjoyed the hands on events a bit more.  They had miniature versions of all the different Athletics for the kids to try their hand at; the Haggis Hurl (Chris quipped that's what you do after eating it), the Caber toss, and something whose name escapes me where they used a shovel to throw a sack over a high jump backward. Click Here to see videos of the boys attempts. Little Amber enjoyed the miniature golf.

We grabbed some very large home made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (yummy) and wandered over to the adult Athletic field, where we also found the Archery.  The boys truly enjoyed this; all three tried their hand at the regular bow and the log throwing crossbow.  Both Jared and Titus hit the dummy with crossbow, but at different spots. Titus' shot hit the dummy directly in the head. On Jared's attempt, the projectile hit in spot that made all the men in a 20 yard radius take notice and cringe. :-)

We finished off our day laying in the nice perennial rye watching the Men's Caber Toss competition.  Even Amber joined in cheering.  It was amazing to see these men pick up, carry and try to flip what is essentially a telephone pole 180 degrees.  Towards the end of the competition, the crowd was very pleased when two were able to flip the Caber!

The festival continued way into the evening but we left after about five hours, plenty tired from a nice day outside.