San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo Brooks and Dunn

Bull Riding
My Feet Hurt (this is 20 feet from the truck)
THOR - the tallest living horse in the world

Calf Roping

We had a great day at the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo today. It turned out to be a lot longer than planned, but we saw it all. The one thing they were lacking is general information for the ignorant public such as us. We found that everything said the concert by Brooks and Dunn was to start at 7PM, well the real rodeo started then and they followed. So we got there at 10 AM and ended up putting in a 12 hour day. Luckily, Yvonne's feet hurt in her cowboy boots right away, so before we got too far, we got her into running shoes.

We started the day with a few animal shows, puppet shows, and bouncy inflatable kid things. There were quite a few school groups there in the morning, so it was busy for a while. After they left, Yvonne could go from one bouncy thing to another. She was in heaven. We somehow got ourselves to 3:30 without realizing it, so we went back to the truck and just lay our heads down a while to rest. We then went to the Midway where they had a PNE type thing set up with carnival rides. Yvonne and Jim went on the carousel. Yvonne went on a few other rides by herself. We also stopped and viewed some of the livestock that were up for judging. Yvonne got to pet an angora goat - they look like blonde rastafarian sheep. We also got to see THOR - the tallest living horse - he's a Fresian. Our interesting tidbit of the day is that a goat has a rectangular pupil rather than round. Wierd.

We managed to get ourselves to 7 PM and climbed up to our nose-bleeder seats. Actually, they gave us a great view, but also gave us the weird feeling of sitting on a cliff. The rodeo was absolutely amazing. They have hundreds of contestants from all over the world competing each night for two weeks. They have bare-back and saddled bucking broncos, bull riding, calf roping, team calf roping, calf scramble, and barrel racing. It was quite exciting and so well done. The USA sure knows how to do that primal type entertainment well. They had big screens, special song snippets and laser shows just like hockey at home - actually more like basketball while we had it.

Brooks and Dunn put on a great show. We got to see about 5 songs before Yvonne couldn't handle it anymore. We went down to the mezzanine and managed to listen to a couple more away from the really loud music in the stadium.

We're off tomorrow to do a long day to Ft. Stockton, then another to Las Crucas, NM.