Rounders!

People often ask me what we do after hours at reenactments. It varies--some people eat dinner (it's been on the fire most of the afternoon), chat a bit, and go to bed; others (ahem, myself included) stay up into the wee hours roving from campfire to campfire, singing songs, laughing a bit too much until we collapse into our bedrolls, exhausted, to nab a few hours' sleep before the morning.

But one thing we'll all join in on? Playing or watching a game of rounders.

Rounders is a bit like cricket, a bit like baseball, and a lot of fun. It's played on a diamond, like baseball, but you use something akin to a cricket bat. You run bases, but you can't get out if the ball makes it to the base first--only if you're touched by the ball (throwing the ball at someone is allowed, so I suppose there's a bit of dodgeball thrown in for good measure). We play by the rule that you can't strike out.

These photos were taken by a friend of mine last year--we're dressed down, some of us still in eighteenth-century attire, some changed into modern clothes, some of us in between. It was a rainy and unseasonably chilly day in August, so you'll see some eighteenth-century outerwear interspersed in there.

A Continental Marine in a Cubs hat helps a merchant's daughter with the bat. She was one of our younger players.

And our pitcher was over seventy--and looking very fetching in North American Dutch clothing (notice the black cap over her white one--that's a Dutch thing).

A shot of the field--quite a motley assortment of us! The green-coated lad is a Continental Marine, winded from running all the way to third. The fellow next to him is wearing a great coat against the cold.

Wooden stakes are used instead of bases. Home plate has a bucket next to it--if the ball is placed in the bucket before the runner reaches home, he or she is out.

What's a game without an announcer? We commandeered the PA system that we use for demonstrations and tacticals.

On occasion we'll play football, too, but that's of course of less historical interest. And only the teenaged and younger adult guys play for the most part--though a few intrepid women will join (I'm sneaky on short passes, myself).