NCEPR: MN peeps - Tall Ships Festival in Duluth, worth it?

[stephogirl]

My family (my mom, dad, sister, etc) want to go to the Tall Ships Festival next year in Duluth and are reserving hotel rooms now. They want to know if we're going so they can block off a hotel room for us too.

Has anyone been to this before? I know it draws a shitton of people. Is it worth it? I'd be taking DH and my DSs, who would be 10 and 6 by then. 

[aprilsails]

I just did some research and they haven't released the line-up of tall ships as of yet. My answer mostly depends on which ships are going, since I would only go if there were some larger international ships, which the Great Lakes festivals sometimes lack.

So - I used to work on these boats, and worked three summers straight of these festivals in the Great Lakes and East Coast. If you or your DH are history buffs or into sailing they are definitely a nice way to spend a weekend. The Tall Ships festivals generally play out like normal city festivals with fair type food stalls and food trucks (sometimes rides too), night time music acts (usually at a local park or open air stadium), and looong lines. Depending on the size of the ship, when you go on a tour they will walk you around the deck where you can ask questions, or most of the crew have a canned tourist friendly explanation of how the ship works, where they sail, etc. On larger ships you may also be able to go below decks for a peek at the living quarters (not very many do this since people actually live down there).

Your sons ages are good as long as they aren't going to be too bored. Kids generally enjoyed pretending pirates and I would teach them knots (bring rope!). They will do demonstrations with cannons at some point daily. There will be a parade of sail at some point during the weekend where the boats will pretend to sail around the harbour (with their engines running - we rarely did this under actual sail since the wind never worked out properly). But they look cool.

In all honesty, working from the other side, I always found the Tall ship events to be really weird. I mean, they were awesome for the funnel cakes alone, but otherwise as an actual sailor we really preferred to be out sailing.

I feel like I'm doing a terrible job of selling this event.