Advertisement
Published: July 22nd 2012
Edit Blog Post
Stampede day had arrived and we had woken nice and early to get a head start but before we go to stampede we went to the farmers market just east of the stampede grounds. There were lots of fruits, veges and some food stalls too. We bought an éclair and browsed the stalls. Looks like a good place to come to when we get our own kitchen.
We headed to the stampede and found we had arrived at the Stampede early (10am) so we had a wander around while some of the stalls were setting up and got to see some of the behind the scenes action as they washed and dried some of the animals to be displayed. At 11am the grounds were all up and running. The first stop for us was the BMO building this was where we went on parade day to get Manda’s goodie bag. As we hunted through the stalls, Shane bought an Indian calved ocarina (a type of flute) in the shape of a turtle which should make a good souvenir and is really easy to play.
We found our seats which were in a great place. We were lucky as some of
the seats couldn't really see the real action, instead they had to watch it on a big screen to get a closer look .
The Stampede started with the Stampede Show Band. Once the Show Band finished the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came out and did a show, the horses are very well trained and the show was great, they made lots of different formations including a rolling wagon wheel.
There was bareback, bull riding, ladies barrel racing, saddle bronc, steer wrestling, tie down roping, novice bareback, novice saddle bronc, junior steer riding and wild pony racing. The wild pony racing was Amanda's favourite, there were teams of girls and boys, aged about 11, they had to catch the wild pony and one of them had to get on and ride it. There were a lot of kids hanging onto the rope and being dragged though the dust around the arena.
We tried lots of food at the Stampede including, corn dogs, hot dogs, pepperoni and cheese pizza even a frozen banana dipped in chocolate and nuts.
We also gave the sideshows a go, Shane found one he really liked, which was shooting a slug gun, you
had to shoot the star on the paper completely out. He got really close twice and on the second one it actually looked completely gone until you had a closer look. We tried a couple of other ones that looked like they could be easy-ish but we didn’t win anything, We saw lot of people walking around with a cute racoon teddy bear and Amanda wanted one, just before we left the stampede we found the sideshow where they were, we gave it a try and won a small one, but Amanda wanted a bigger one so we gave it another try and another and got a medium sized one, we decided to stop at that size because if it was too big it wouldn’t be able to come home with us.
We watched a demonstration of tent pegging, which was put on by some Australians, it was very impressive because it’s too far to bring horses so they trained some over here and only had 10 days to train them to do what they wanted them to do. The best part was a guy that stood up on the back of two horses and rode around and a
guy that was able to get his horse to lie down and roll onto its back and be like a cat (that’s the best way for me to explain what it was like).
The Indian Village was great too, there were lots of Tipis and we watched a show which featured different dances. There were also some other kiwis there who went up on stage and joined in a dance. We should have got up too but were not too keen on public performances and stayed clear of being called up.
Before leaving there was one last chance to get a souvenir so we found a small 100th year Calgary stampede cow bell to go with the ocarina we bought earlier.
Off to the C-train and back home after a long day, Time to get a good night’s sleep for roller blading tomorrow…
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 54; dbt: 0.049s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Amy
non-member comment
Love this photo :)