Summer of the Dammed.: Load of Bull.

And horse, and pig and sheep. Basically anything farm related. Plus many many many many many pretend cowboys. And a few real ones. I'm talking about the Calgary Stampede of course!

Welcome!


Nice boots.

My mum, Amanda and I left for Calgary on thursday morning, abandoning May, Dhiraj and Jeff to deal with the Jeep. Very considerate of me. Me and my mum walked around Calgary for a while. Lots of people buying cowboy boots and hats. Clearly the Stampede build up was reaching fever pitch. I've always thought cowboy boots were for weirdos or actual cowboys, so have never been in the least bit tempted to get a pair, but I may have to modify my opinion! There were quite a few very interesting pairs of boots on display. We managed to resist though. Hefty price tags do that. Besides, I was still worrying about the Jeep. When Jeff called at 3ish to say they had extracted it, it was a huge relief! Perfect set up for going stampeding!

I had been badly needing a beer since the day before, so I finally got one at the place we went for dinner. Black Betty's Burger and Winebar. I'm not a restaurant critic, but I would say the burgers were good, but not great. More to my liking was the Okanagan Summerweizen on tap. Lovely. It's my beer of the field season. From there it was back to Amanda's aunt and Uncles house, who were kindly putting us up for the weekend. The last time I stayed there, there was an impromptu 4am beer session followed by a fantastic hangover. Amanda gained her revenge for being woken when I stumbled to bed by dragging me around Ikea at 10am. Horrific. Lucky for me they were out when we got there, so I would still make the stampede in the morning!

Blending in.

The entertainment tent.

11am on Friday, we got to the Stampede grounds. For those who don't know, the Calgary Stampede has a dedicated ground, basically to hold a rodeo once a year. So they take it pretty seriously. First things first, we had to get our cowboy hats to help us blend in. Mine was nice and understated. We met a friend of Amanda's who is a bit of a rodeo fan and goes to a couple a year. I suspect he wasn't impressed with my headgear. I suspect many people weren't impressed. I certainly got more than one funny look! Not sure the Calgary Stampede is ready for that sort of thing.

No, I didn't steal her hat! It's mine!

So on to the actual rodeo part. For those that don't know, that's where all the cowboy 'sports' come in. I can't quite remember all the names, so some of these might be made up. There was some horsie riding thing, where a belt type thing is tightened around the horse belly just in front of its back legs. This caused the horse to buck, trying to kick off the belt thing. The contestants have to try and stay on for 8 seconds. I gather there are different types of this. Novice, bareback, saddled I think. So a fair bit of this. Then there was the calf lassoing. Easy one to understand, this. A cowboy on a horse and a calf are released from gates at the same time, and the cowboy has one attempt to lasso it, then jump off his horse and tie up its legs. A bit cruel looking. So it was quite funny to see at least 5 out of 10 people miss. A new record apparently. 'Mon the calves! There was also

Mounties being stereotypical.

Steer Tackling(?). This looked a bit crazy. Steer and rider released at the same time. Rider has to jump off his horse and tackle the steer around the horns and tip it on its back! What amazed me is that when they let the steer up, it didn't try and get its revenge. I know I would! Bull riding was also done. This is much the same as the horsie riding thing, except with a pissed off bull. Ominously, the announcer told us that one of the bulls had killed two people this year. Yikes! All these events are for men only. So I imagine that in the interests of keeping the ladies sweet, the barrel race thing was introduced at some point. Ladies get to ride as fast as possible in a figure of eight around three barrels. Awww, isn't that nice, that they get something to make them feel involved! There was also a hilarious kiddies race thing. They have teams of three, and a line attached to a young horse. The gate opens and the horse tries to run away. The kids have to try and catch the horse and then one of them has to jump on and ride it for a few seconds. What mostly happens, is the three kids manage to stop the horse, then one lets go of the rope to jump on, the horse is able to bolt and one kid lets go and the other gets dragged around the arena! Fair play though, some of those kids took a good dragging before they gave up!

So that was the rodeo part. Completely foreign to me, but very entertaining. After that we watched some cattle penning. Which is very impressive. There are 30 cattle, numbered 0-9 (so 3 of each number). 3 riders have to weed out the number called, and drive those cattle to the pen, while keeping the others away. A bit like one man and his dog, but a lot faster. And with 3 men. And horses. And cattle. And no sheep. And no dogs. So nothing like one man and his dog. More entertaining than it sounds! We also watched the heavy horse show. But the less said about that the better. A good place for a nap.

Good ole boys... and girls.

Before heading home, we watched the Stampede band play a medley. They were very good. But after half an hour, I kind of felt they had made their point. Still another half an hour to watch though. The Stampede band is clearly an inclusive organisation for young people. As long as you're middle class and well off you can get in... They were very good, but it seems strange to me that anyone that age would put in so much effort to be in a band. I can only imagine they are quite geeky at school...

That was quite a long day, so we headed home. This time I couldn't avoid the drinking with our hosts. Fortunately we all managed to show some restraint and get to bed by 1! This was good since we planned to be at the Stampede again on Saturday.

Deep fried cheesecake!

We headed to the grounds a bit later on Saturday, as we planned to go to the evening show and fireworks. Mostly we just walked around, looking at agricultural stuff and food stalls and the rides. Now, the food was quite interesting. Canadians are clearly engaged in research into what foods can be served on a stick. Hotdogs, and corn dogs, obviously. Spiral sliced potato crisp, sure, why not. Pizza on a stick? Errr, okay, well done getting that to work! And I'll no longer ever take any abuse from a Canadian over the presumption that deep fried mars bars are common in Scotland, and that we deep fry everything. Here's a list of deep fried things I saw;

Waffle dogs!


Salad anyone? Anyone?!

Oreos, cheescake, Kool Aid! There were many more, but I forget. I had also been promised donut burgers. A maple glazed donut, with a burger in the middle. Apparently it didn't make the cut this year. Probably lost all its customers through heart attacks. There were waffle dogs though. A hot dog wrapped in a belgian waffle. They'd probably deep fry that if you asked. It wasn't all unhealthy food, there was a salad stall. It had no queue.

Bang! Is what that sounded like.

Anyway, the start of the evening was the Chuckwagon racing. Or as a result of my bad memory, the Chubbycars. This isn't my first Chubbycar race. I saw them at the Saskatoon Ex. Quite a strange one to explain. So I'll just give you a you tube link! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy7AveEtHZ8. Perfectly set up for betting. A pity it's illegal. After that it was the evening show. All very big budget looking, with lots of flashing lights and loud, bad

So so.

music. Some good acrobatic acts. Then some country signer called Paul Brandt or something. I though that was the name of the president of Canada, but maybe that's Ben Harper, I forget... Anyway, popular country music holds no interest for me, so it was without regret that we left a bit early, and watched the fireworks from outside of the grandstand. They were pretty good. Pity my phones camera is rubbish.

Lucky not to be Scottish

Oh, and one little bit of history about the Calgary Stampede. Apparently it was founded by a guy called Guy Weadick. Not a name that would have served well in Scotland. He would have done well to make it out of primary school there!

So that's about that. I would recommend this to anyone, especially if the idea of cowboying and all its trappings are unfamiliar to you!

Bit of a descriptive boring update this. My apologies. Reads more like an article about holiday activities in Calgary...

Oh, and a great find at the liquor store. Some good old TL. Clearly a delicacy here going by the price! Here's some left over photo's too.