Calgary Stampede 2007

It's Stampede time in Calgary. We had tickets for the rodeo this past Saturday. The original plan was to head down to the grounds, see the sights and check out the rodeo. On Friday Emma came home from day camp with a fever and the chills. We think it was a case of heat/sun stroke, or something like that. She didn't really want to eat or drink but we managed to get her to drink some fluids. Because of this unexpected situation we changed our plans. Lori decided to stay home with Emma while I took Oliver down to the grounds.

The first part of the day involved a train ride down to the grounds. I'm pretty certain that this was the first time Oliver ever rode the train. He seemed to enjoy the ride and got a little excited whenever we went through a tunnel.

Arriving at the grounds I expected it to be crazy busy considering we were attending on what I believe is traditionally the busiest day of Stampede. There were a lot of people there already but not nearly as many as I was anticipating.

The first thing we checked out was the end of a show where we saw 5 people (3 adults and 2 kids) inside a giant balloon. That was pretty neat...for about 2 seconds. Next we wandered around and ended up watching the rodeoX which was a bunch of BMXers doing crazy stuff (i.e. back flips and huge jumps). Later we headed to the Coke stage to watch Dr. Draw. By this time Oliver and I were hungry so we went to buy some pizza. Two slices and $8 later we headed back to watch the band while we ate.

Once the pizza was gone it was time to meet Paul with whom we ended up spending the rest of the day. But first I needed to spend more money because Oliver needed a spider man popsicle, complete with gumballs for eyes. If you look closely at the image above (*click to enlarge*) you can see the gum in Oliver's mouth.

Once we met up with Paul (who took all the pictures because I couldn't be bothered to lug around our camera and left it at home) we wandered around and checked out some animals. We saw ducks, sheep, goats, horses and a cow.

For the next several hours we walked around and pretty much just people watched. We watched people going on rides, people playing the games, people walking around. Oliver was getting pretty tired (so was I...did I mention I carried him for pretty much the entire 7 hours we were at the grounds because I was too stubborn to bring a stroller?) and I thought some mini donuts would give him a little sugar rush to keep on keepin' on.

While waiting in line for our sugar with donuts (I'm not kidding...I measured the remaining sugar mixture from the bottom of the bag once we got home and there was at least 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup...nasty) a kind woman offered Oliver a large stuffed monkey that she no longer wanted. It took a while but the donuts finally cooled enough for Oliver to handle them and it was time for him to eat. He barely took one lick and decided he wasn't interested in eating them. So I stupidly went and immediately purchased a bag of cotton candy which resulted in the same reaction from Oliver - one lick and he wanted "something else". By this point I was too frustrated to even bother getting "something else" so I ignored his requests for quite some time and we walked around some more until I found a place with fries. He ate those suckers, no problem.


Although we didn't go on any of the rides, Paul decided it would be fun to see how tall Oliver is. Actually, what Paul really wanted to do was to stand his 6'3'' frame by the sign to show how tall he is. I don't have the picture of that but I can honestly tell you that it exists because Paul handed me his camera and I took the picture.

After all those spicy fries Oliver had eaten he was pretty thirsty. I had a couple bottles of water in my back pack but by this time the sun had finally come out (it was overcast for most of the day which actually made for a great day because it wasn't too hot) and it was starting to get warm. I decided to buy Oliver some apple juice. Do you know how hard it was to find apple juice? I was only able to find apple juice at a vending machine. And, yes, I paid the $3.50 for the beverage. I'm just glad Oliver doesn't like slurpees all that much ($9.00 for a large at the grounds).

We ended the day by just barely finding seats at the Superdogs show. The show, surprisingly, ended up being an hour long. It was entertaining but Oliver began to get bored with watching dogs do the same thing over and over again. Dogs running and jumping and running and spinning and running and catching Frisbees and running.

Finally it was time to head home which meant another fun ride on the train. I'm sure Oliver had more fun on the train than he did at the grounds. And, no, we never ended up going to rodeo. Maybe next year.