Road Trip - Calgary Stampede

We started the day with a trip to Starbucks, and a visit to Roots (a Canadian clothing/fashion store) to get Katie a new bag. Her current one is fine, but it's big, and we're heading to the Calgary Stampede where we'll have to walk around in crowds of people for the whole day.

The Calgary Stampede is an annual rodeo, exhibition and festival held every July in Calgary, Alberta, which bills itself as "The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth". Over 1 million people visit each year to enjoy one of the world's largest rodeos, a parade, midway, stage shows, concerts, agricultural competitions, and chuckwagon racing.

We drove for about 1.5 hours from Banff to Calgary. The mountains we have been surrounded by for the last two weeks were quickly left behind, the scenery moving from hills to plains, with crops and cows. Eventually, we rounded a bend over a small hill, and a massive, sprawling city appeared in front of us.

As we got closer to the stadium where the Stampede is held, we started to see more and more cowboy hats and boots. The whole city gets behind the event, with posters and banners hung all over the place, along with many homemade signs in office windows and in front of houses. We paid for parking in a carpark run by a local charity and walked for about 10 minutes to the showground entrance. We passed a concrete truck who had spilled its load of concrete all over the intersection just minutes before. The driver wasn't having a good day.

In the showgrounds, we were blown away by the lights, colours, people, costumes, and the size and extravagance of everything! We met up with Simon (a mate of mine from work who has been living in Canada), who became our tour guide for the day. He'd been in Calgary since Saturday and had been at the Stampede almost every day since. He pointed out his favourite bar and told us some good stories of what he'd been up to since we last saw him in Whistler.

We had tickets for the evening show, so we had several hours to enjoy the enormous selection of general entertainment offered at the Stampede. We:

Watched a marching band, with a colour guard and dance line, performing popular hit songs
Had lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant, which had good food but was surprisingly quiet given the crowds of people outside
Saw a dog show (called the Dog Bowl, playing on Super Bowl), with dogs doing the high jump, frisbee catches, long jump, and more. One dog decided he didn't want to take part today and ran backstage, refusing to come out and compete
Stood in the searing sun for a few minutes watching freestyle motocross riders doing tricks on huge jumps
Sat in a theatre and saw the semi-finals of the Calgary Stampede Talent Search
Came across a blacksmithing demonstration
Watched a disappointing rope-making presentation, where they actually just demonstrated a rope-making machine
Walked past numerous food trucks, each with bigger and crazier signage than the last. Simon thought it looked like the Las Vegas strip, but for carny food
Hung out for a while in the shade of a tree in front of the Coca-Cola stage, and listened to some local artists performing
Perused the market hall, full of arts and crafts, and live action infomercials. We walked through a 5th-wheel RV, which was crazy huge and full of wood and leather

The crazy heat of the day eventually turned into a wind warning, with reports of 100km/h gusts ripping through the city. The wind stopped the motocross display, blew soft toys from the midway shows out into the crowds, and stung our eyes with dust. We escaped and had dinner in a vast open building called the Big 4, and got heaps of food for only $8. There was an eating competition going on while we were waiting for our food, called the "Meat Sweats."

The main event of our day was the evening Grand Stand show, which is what we'd actually bought tickets for. It started off with chuckwagon racing, which is a strange style of horse racing with a wagon pulled by a 4-horse team accompanied by two outriders. The race starts with them all together, facing the wrong way on the track, with one outrider off his horse holding the wagon team in place. At the gun, the other outrider throws a barrel into the back of the chuckwagon (representing a camp stove), and the first outrider releases the team. All 6 horses and the wagon have to do a figure 8 around some barrels laid out on the racecourse, and then they accelerate off around the track, with the first wagon crossing the line the winner.

Following the racing was an impressive variety show, celebrating 50 years of the Calgary Stampede. The show was performed with lots of singing and dancing by the Young Canadians (a performance group put together just for the Stampede), with appearances from lots of special guests. There was a comedian (who had a stutter and made lots of jokes about Invisalign), a magician who performed a daring escape from a bear trap, a ventriloquist, and a performance by Andy Kim. At the end of the show, there was a gigantic fireworks display, in time with the final musical number.

We walked back to the car at about midnight, and it started raining just as we got there. After a quick coffee stop, we set off on the two-hour drive to Drumheller, where we'd booked a campsite for the night. The road was dead straight and pitch black for almost the entire journey. It rained the whole way, and I quickly discovered that our windscreen wipers really weren't up to the task; leaving big smears of water over the window with each wipe. The total darkness mixed with the rain made the drive quite surreal. We couldn't see anything around us except for the markings on the road ahead. Sometimes we'd come across a car coming in the other direction, but it was almost impossible to tell how far away they were. They could be anywhere from 50m to 20km away, and then they'd either pass you (often without dipping their headlights) or disappear for a while behind a slight hill on the road.

Eventually, we arrived in Drumheller at 2am and set up camp in a short break in the rain. A thunder and lightning storm was happening nearby, and for several hours lying in bed we'd just see a flash of light followed a few seconds later by colossal rolling, echoing booms. It was an extraordinary, slightly frightening experience. Eventually, the thunder subsided only to be replaced by big wind gusts, making the tent shake and the fly whip against the roof.