Greater St Louis Ren Faire '08

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Memorial Day Weekend - Sunday Night

A few of the shots, that turned out, I took Sunday night around 10:30 pm when there was a slight break in the storm.  We drove down to the front gate to see if we could get out (there are only two ways to drive out ... both low-water bridges) and had to stop just short of the front gates' privies ... about 150 feet short of front gate.

What you are seeing in these shots is the total destruction of one merchants booth and, likely, the total wash-out of the cart of another merchants contents.  I'm not sure if the owner of the cart took all of her product with her before this or not.  Just in front of the cart (protecting it from the full onslaught of the river as it turns out) is the booth merchants tents, product and belongings.   You can see the edge of the river ... which is maybe 200 feet out of it's bank on this one side only ... and the waves/ripples where it's really running quite quickly even here.  The gravel you can see here is the main entrance pathway ... but only maybe 1/3rd of it as the other is under the water.  The privies, just to the left of that little tree, were just starting to get flooded at this point too.

I believe this was the worst of the damage to the site and property.  Lots of deep ruts all over the site, some minor flooding to higher-ground booths and rain damage to merchandise elsewhere, of course.

Memorial Day Weekend - Monday Morning

Around midnight, the skies cleared and it was a nice star-y night.  Until around 3:30 am and it stormed again.  Here, you can see that the flood waters had gone down considerably by around 6:30 am and I was able to walk further down to the front gate.  The first picture shows the foot bridge and where the river should normally be running ... albeit really high.  Normally, it's just a trickle ... enough to wet your toes but not much else.  Apparently, the river had run over the foot-bridge and was now on its' way down.

The second picture shows the low-water bridge next to the foot bridge and some white-water.  There was no leaving the site for us for several more hours until the waters lowered just enough so that we could eventually cross the up-stream low-water bridge in our large 4x4 truck ... before the next round of rain hit.

It certainly was a "dark and stormy night" with a whole lot of rain, thunder, high winds and hail.  But, the faire will be opened and ready for business, fun, humor, song, dance, beer and flirting the next weekend.  I know that we will be there, next to the Wooden Badger Pub (aka "The Kiddie Pub") with hand-made furniture, goblets, kitchenware and all sorts of wooden gifts.  Come say "hi" !