Aleta, your tour guide
Have fun! Come travel with me.
First Weekend in July – The International Witches Fair – Watch reenactors capture witches and heretics. Watch the lost souls get tried. Be enthralled by their torture. Be entranced by lovingly recreated witches’s covens. Listen to the excommunication of the entire town. Watch as Pope Julius II curses the entire village of Trasmoz, Spain. The festival sports an authentic medieval market place and medieval camp. There are parades, magic shows, musical shows, and medieval combat. You’ll want to go year after year just to see everything. Learn about medieval plants. Learn how to poison someone. Or maybe you’ll want to heal people with medieval medicinal plants. To each his own.
August – World Bog Snokeling Championships – LLanwrtyd, Wales. People come from all over the world to race 120-yards through a peat bog. Is it difficult? Dunno. But it is only 120 yards long. Many find the competition to be intense. People root on their favorite snorkelers.If you’re an ironman, if you’re a triathlete, you simply must enter in the Bog Snorkeling Championships. It consists of an 8-mile run, a 12-mile Mountain Bike ride, and a 60-yard bog snorkel. There’s lots of fun for the spectators as well. Graze and quaff your way through the food and drink stands. Work your way to the ale and cider bar. Listen to live music as your kids stampede the bouncy castle. The festival encourages fancy dress.
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August 26 to 28 – Redhead Days Festival – Held this year in Tilburg, Netherlands. Be there to strut your awesome redheadness or if you’re not redheaded yourself, to absorb the sunshine emanating from so much redheads assembled in one place. Be sure to check the event’s website before you bring your clothes. Attendees all dress in the same color, which will have been decided by voting. Planned highlights include: dress-up contest, pub crawl, kids playground, hot tubs (not in the kids playground), food stands, cocktail workshop, BBQ, art exhibition with a red-haired theme , open stage, singing, salsa dancing, lectures, photoshoots, poetry, and cycling tours. Spend your days at the festival, then head to the exciting after-festival parties. There’s even a late night, redhead party at Netherland’s best known gay bar, The Lollipop. All are welcome.
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Last Wednesday in Augsust – Last La Tomatina – The world’s best tomato festival, La Tomatina, is held in Buñol, Spain. The festival starts with the eating of many different tomato-based dishes. Yum! However, dining on the tomato is not the reason for La Tomatina’s extraordinary popularity. The festival hosts the world’s biggest tomato fight. Yippee.
Note: festival dates are prone to change. Check before you book. You don’t want to lug your broom all the way to Spain only to discover the International Witches Fair won’t take place another two weeks.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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