yee haw cowboy

Here's a first -- I went to a Professional Bull Riding competition in KC, MO. Yep, I went rodeo (but I have been corrected many many times that the PBR is NOT a rodeo, or just not a full fledged rodeo). When I channel surf, sometimes I see bull riding and I always cringed when I see the bull buck off the rider, or the rider is stomped upon by the bull. It only keeps my attention for a couple minutes before I start changing the channels again.

Seeing bull riding in person, however, is a WHOLE different story. My goodness, I thought I was going to have a heart attack trying to will the rider to stay on the bull or holding my breath for what seems like an enternity because if I breathe, the cowboy just might fall off the bull and it will gore him to death with its horns. Overall, I survived, as well as all the cowboys in the competition, and no bulls were harmed in the making of this post.

So, here's a picture of the "opening ceremony," with flames and all the cowboys standing in line. The ones who make a lot of money are announced by name.
Funny story of the night: There was eight girls in our group, thus eight tickets. We decided to go with two family packs, which each consisted of four entrance tickets and each ticket came with a voucher for a hot dog and soda. So, technically, that's eight hot dogs and eight sodas total.

When we went to redeem our meal tickets, however, we got more than we bargained for (literally speaking). K was up first at the counter and asked the food lady, "So, what can I get for with this food voucher?" Lo and behold, the food lady said, "four hot dogs and four sodas. So what kinda soda you want?" SCORE! So K and I used our two tickets to get the eight hot dogs and sodas for the group. When we told the others what happened, we laughed and said that we should cash in the remaining food vouchers and get 24 hot dogs and sodas before we left the show. Unfortunately, we were either too full from the first hot dog and soda, or we were running away from a creep, that we forgot to collect our remaining hot dogs and sodas (we just really wanted the bottled sodas to take home).

During the breaks between bull riders, they had different things going on, one of which was a beauty contest for cows - the Best in Show competition. One of them black cows was the winner - I just can't tell which one.

Then there was the competition for kids, where they had to rope a calf and bring it back inside the circle in order to keep the calf. There was this one kid who chased this calf all around the arena, and then the calf decided to play dead weight, and the poor kid must have used all his energy just to get that calf back inside the circle (second video).

And of course, there was the bull riding. See the many videos below.

And here's a very blurry picture of the winner: