Renaissance Productions, South Lake Tahoe

If you’ve ever wanted to go back in time, but didn’t have access to a wormhole, San Jose Fantasy Faire is your next best bet. This annual festival showcases a reimagined Renaissance, complete with a royal court, Master Shakespeare, storytellers, fairies, and a town full of colorful characters. This lost era contains a vast labyrinth of nooks and crannies, from merchants proffering ye olde turkey legs to shops stocked with leather wears and carved tankards. This year's highlight is the one of a kind International Jousting Championships with riders from Canada, Europe and USA duking it out for glory, purse and bragging rights. And no visit to Elizabethan England is complete without seeing the queen, who may also make the occasional appearance to knight a brave warrior or banish a dragon from the realm.