Red Bluff Round Up

‘Early’ Saturday morning, with sad, but grateful hearts for them storing our rig for 10 months, we said our farewells to Ed and Cindy,  packed up and moved on to Red Bluff. We pulled onto the Sycamore Grove USDA campground, which is a very pretty little campground just to the south of Red Bluff. We were here because it is ‘Round Up Week’ and we wanted to catch another rodeo. We had been to one in Lake City Florida in 2009 with our friends Jim and Kath Mobley, but here was a good opportunity to see another one. We decided that we would rest up Saturday and get into it for the final day. We started by going to the Cowboy Church, held in the rodeo grandstand, as it was Easter Sunday. This was very interesting as a large number of the rodeo riders came along and many gave a testimony. We had not expected such enthusiastic support from the rough and hard world of rodeo. We returned to the fairground in the afternoon and took our seats, right at the front,  for the main event and from start to finish it was a high energy afternoon. We started with a parachute drop into the arena, carrying a giant US flag.

We were immersed in the sight, sound, smell (and feel of the dirt clods kicked up by the wild horses) of the rodeo events, wild horses, wild bull riding, bringing down bulls and roping bulls. At the same time horse races were happening, so you didn’t know where to look, all accompanied by various sound bite music anthems, like Queen, the Lone Ranger, etc. As soon as there was a break in the action girls would gallop round the arena waving big flags. For a break from the action we were given a demonstration of wagon pulling by the Budweiser Clydesdale heavy horses and wagon, which was very impressive. After sitting in the sunshine for three hours we returned to the trailer, via Applebees, quite exhausted by the event. This was a fun afternoon, well worth the visit.