Finally, the Stampede

Sorry it's taken me ages to get around to posting these.

On Friday, July 4, the Stampede kicked off in Calgary. There's a massive parade downtown and everything basically shuts down, including the roads and bridges into downtown but not including my workplace.

Anyway, after the parade we took the afternoon off and headed down to the grounds to take in the rodeo, which was actually pretty fun.

The admission gates:


Opening ceremony for the rodeo:


Yee-haw!







And this one's for Tim - the rodeo clown:


The Stampede is basically the CNE with cowboys. Midway, exhibits, new-fangled products, junky food (Gregg ate a bag of deep fried oreos and lived to regret it), gambling and drinking. The big place to drink on the grounds is Nashville North, which is a huge tent with (apparently) big name country musicians on stage. We passed it twice - once at about 1:00 p.m.:


This is the corral for the line up. That sign says: It is a 6 hour wait from this point. We passed by and laughed and said to each other naively, who the hell would wait 6 freaking hours to drink in a tent?

Little did we know, here was the scene by about 4:30:

Notice that the line extends far beyond that sign. Crazy.

The Calgarians sure like their Stampede, and I must admit that it's pretty good. All week, there are big party tents set up all over downtown and pancake breakfasts all over town, some free and some private. I actually saw cops, walking the beat and harassing the derelicts (and drinking on the job, as a matter of fact). Gotta love that Alberta Advantage.

So, back to the here and now. I'm busy redoing the guest room this weekend - paint, trim, doors, etc. I'll post a pic when I'm done (and now I've committed to all of you, it WILL be done before our guests arrive next week!). (What guests, you ask? Robyn, Trevor and Amanda are making the trip to go to the Nine Inch Nails concert on Tuesday! Whee!)

And since I just uploaded the contents of my camera, finally, here are a couple of shots of the front of our house (taken a couple of weeks ago). The majority of these plants came up this spring, yay previous owners for planting perennials.