I am definitely being timely here. I think I am even late given the norms of SCA lateness with this post and a series that follow along shortly. So anyway, I finally attended my first Pennsic War earlier this year. I believe, if I recall correctly, I went up on the last day of July. Due to work schedule and stuff I was only on site about five days. While it was not my first war (and truthfully, Gulf Wars will always be special) it was indeed an awesome experience.
At the time, I made a few notes each day about the things that I did. In the past, after returning home from Gulf Wars I wrote up a good description of the event and it was shared with the populace back in the barony (Black Diamond in Atlantia). It almost always made the rounds on the list serve, but a more formal version was also usually picked up in the baronial newsletter or later, sometimes on the website (Oooooh – an aside, I should go back and find those in digital form and post them here, after all the first ones are almost ten years old, as I was GW X). Anyway, the notes that I made were such that I could give the same kind of treatment to Pennsic.
I will have to say the volume of people to interact with a good deal more at Pennsic then what is to be found at Gulf Wars. You certainly can get a feeling for that with the vast number of tents seen in the aerial picture seen above. On some fronts, such as the battles that is a great thing. A lot more folks to fight with and such as that. On the other hand, it means you have to be even more picky about what you are going to do and with whom you are going to interact. And of course, I enjoyed the heavy fighting, but there were no horses.
Hopefully I will get those started tomorrow, but in the meantime I thought the sharing of this link would be good for my non-medieval friends to get a feel for just some little bit of what Pennsic is all about.
