Medieval Festival + Mt. Barney Hike

A co-worker of mine does medieval reenactments and he told us a few months ago about a big festival that was coming up.  I thought it sounded like fun so I sent out an e-mail and got a group of us excited about going so we went and purchased our tickets in advance so we wouldn't miss out.  The festival was called the Abbey Midieval Festival and they were expecting something like 17,000 people to attend each day (it was Saturday and Sunday).

This is the castle where we watched a lot of the events at.

This was the opening parade where each of the groups walked by in all of their getup.

This was Turkish oil wrestling.  They covered themselves in olive oil and wrestled.  This was one of the events I wanted to watch;)

We went to a jousting match which was really fun to watch.  I think it's probably a lot harder than it looks.

This is my co-worker Nigel in his tent that he made.  It was very impressive!  They had a bunch of little villages that you could walk through and learn about different things.

There was a cannon that they shot off and they warned us that it would be loud, but I had no idea--it was so loud my ears were ringing afterwards.

We all agreed that it was a lot of fun and it reminded me of my favorite show Game of Thrones, haha!

Sunday I woke up early and headed 1 1/2 hours south to Mt. Barney to go hiking.  Someone at work had recommended it so I added it to my list of things to do.

The scenery started out like this through what I would call a pasture.

Then it went through a rainforest.  The temperature changed drastically, it was probably 5-10 degrees cooler in the rainforest.  

At one point I came across this.....I decided to just walk through the water and let my shoes and socks air dry as I kept going.  

Saw a few mountains in the distance at one of the peaks I walked up.

Driving back to Brisbane I pulled over because I saw this....I said what in the world is this, it looked like a cow and a camel in one.  I asked at work today and come to find out it's a Braham cow.  I have never seen one of these in the States--totally awesome if you ask me.  I thought he had scoliosis or something, haha.   

Another fun weekend Down Under!