Not my First Rodeo

But it sure was Sawyer's! My brother thought that 3 months old was a little too little to bring a baby to a rodeo, but I tried to tell him that rodeos are where Montana babies are made (hee hee). Last weekend the PCBR came to the Sears Center in Hoffman Estates. Stephan's parents, two sisters, one brother-in-law and a niece and nephew all piled in a car and met us up there. It started at 7pm and it was indoors, so already it was different from the rodeos we had been to in Montana.

The first thing that stuck me was all the different ideas of what a person should wear to a rodeo. There were lots of people just in city clothes, and a few actually wearing the pearl snap shirts with tight jeans and boots. But the in-between dressers were really funny. Button down Western shirts tucked into baggy low-rider pants... girls in tight jeans, wearing Uggs (those are boots, aren't they?)... lots of boots tucked into jeans (a pet peeve of a few friends of ours)... and hats that weren't quite 'cowboy' hats everywhere.

The rodeo started as they all do, a long tribute to America (eventhough 1/2 the audience was Latino) and a prayer to God that everyone stay safe. They bucked 35 head that night, and had 8 barrel racers do their thing in the middle. It was weird being indoors, with dirt trucked in to cover the cement floor. But the rodeo clown was funny, and the bull fighters kept everyone safe. Stephan and I knew just enough to appreciate the AAA-ness of the bulls and riders. Only one or two bulls were really rank, the rest were pretty tame.

The biggest difference was the arena pricing. $7.00 for a beer?? Heck, the Lutherans bring their own beer and keep it in their trucks!

[I just realized that I never posted the story about when we played Luthran vs Catholic softball in Montana and I realized the true difference between the two religions. The Lutherans brought beer and kept it in their trucks in the parking lot. The Catholics had no beer. So, knowing that, the last sentence of this post should make a lot more sense.]