Blanche & Lucy go to a Canadian Rodeo

Last weekend we met up with a bunch of our Canadian friends to attend the Canadian Rockies International Rodeo (C.R.I.R.).  It was held just outside of Calgary in the little town of Strathmore, in the Alberta Province.

 Our RV sites were on 'Cowgirl Cul de Sac'.

As you can see - we camped in a semi-circle - wagon train style for this weekend event.

 We decided to decorate Judy & Marlene's tent for Canada Day (July 1st) this weekend since this is where we will eat and party as a group for the next few days.

 Barb is helping out with the decorating of our party tent.

 With the sun still shining - Judy & Cheryl watch the decorating while standing in a  little rain shower.

Our RVs were a bit of a distance from the rodeo grounds so here we are lucky enough to catch this shuttle when we wanted to go view some of the events.

Our first morning - Marlene and Judy treated us to a campside breakfast - nothing like the smell of bacon cooking outdoors in the morning.

Marlene - our bacon chef has everything under control.

 

Yup - we're all about that outdoor eating together at the campsite.

The thing that is flipping us out most is the length of daylight we are seeing in each day here - it stays light till almost 11o'clock at night with the sun setting as late as 9:30pm.  Here's a great shot of our friend Barb and her dog Sadie with the setting sun at about 9:45pm!!

Our 3 little girls were getting their last walk of the evening before bedtime - almost 10pm and the sun was just setting!!  Beautiful long days of sun!

For our Cowgirls it was all about the outdoor feasts!  Marlene & Judy created yet another tasty breakfast for us - pancakes, bacon, toast and Judy's home-made jams. Yum!

The Rodeo opened each day with a somber ceremony called "Riderless Horse" - usually done in memory of those rodeo performers that had passed away during this past year.  In this case it was in memory of the cowgirl's dad and the cowboy's partner.  Look closely you'll see that the boots are set backwards in the stirrups in memory.

Riding a steer can be a dangerous event - those horns can do some serious damage.

How many women does it take to grill chicken? One to cook and 2 to chat.

It was a little chilly tonight so Flo & Co graciously offered their RV for us to all dine in together.

One of the entertaining events we enjoyed was performed on each day by the West Country Riders.  A group of 10 women performed synchronized riding - some gals holding flags.

 

As they sang the Canadian National Anthem this gal trotted then ran her horse around the arena as they did for the American flag.

As they sang the US National Anthem that rider rode around the arena as well.

This part was when all 10 riders would add to the each end as the line rotated - till the last 2 on the end were really running to keep up.

 Here's some of our troupe ready for another day of Rodeo viewing.

This event is a timed competition called 'Pole Bending' where horse and rider must weave in and out between standing poles about 12ft apart twice - then race to the starting point.  Horse and rider with the best time is the winner.

This little gal was the winner and this was her first Rodeo entrance so it was exciting to see her win.

Though this competition was for both men and women - they competed within their own category.

 

I was quite impressed by this little gals speed - but she loss by a fraction of a second.

 3 of our crazy group decided to see what all the fun was like in one of those kid's bouncing inflatable contraptions.... see the hands and heads poking out?

 There was an awful lot of partying going on (not us of course) - this is what some of the 'extreme partiers' looked like the morning after - outside his RV...

 

Saturday night we enjoyed a Steak BBQ put on by the Rodeo Assoc.  The food was really good which surprised all of us given the amount of diners they had to feed.

 

Here are a couple of friends that Blanche & Lucy (and all of us of course) met while at the Rodeo - Canadians, Kevin and Curt were camping right across from us and we enjoyed meeting them and spending the weekend as neighbors with them.

On our last day at the Rodeo Campground with only 3 hrs left to the Rodeo, we experienced a Tornado scare.  Here we are in the Tornado Shelter where we were brought with our pets to wait out the storm.  There were about 300 people that were evacuated from the campground to this shelter with their pets or kids.  They had music going and the bar open to keep folks happy and busily distracted.  As you can see we were not too scared or worried at this point.

Here the Strathmore Constable was telling us that we could not leave the shelter yet as 2 tornadoes touched down between the town of Strathmore and Calgary. However, after a little while we were notified that all was well and we did leave to go back to the campsite to cleanup the mess.... luckily very little damage on our sites except for one of our friends who's canopy tent was lifted and thrown into her RV putting a damaging hole in the side of her RV which will have to be repaired.  The campground had a mess of tents pulled out of the ground and thrown about, and some campers awnings were also damaged (no one we knew thank goodness) a couple of port-a-potties tipped over and lots of trash thrown about.  But we were none the worse for the experience.