In August, we drove to New Windsor, Illinois to attend the rodeo. It is about 10 minutes away from Woodhull which is where we lived for 4 years before moving to Tremont. We met up with our neighbors at the parade and had a nice visit with them before we headed to the rodeo. Roy and Donna are sitting to Chad’s left. A bonus was meeting the wife/mom and one of the girls of the family that live in our old house! They are such a sweet family.
The last time we saw Roy and Donna was in Southern Texas on a trip we took.
Some humor in the parade…
Paint Horses!!!
Donna, Roy, and their granddaughter with our children.
On to the RODEO…
They had some games for the children in the arena before the rodeo started.
Cowboy boot toss.
Barn Chore Race – fill the bucket with feed, race to dump it in another tub, return and drop bucket in starting tub.
Cowboy hat toss
The stage coach
The National Anthem
The local drill team displaying sponsor flags.
This little guy came in behind the team. His (I’m guessing miniature horse) wasn’t cooperating very well, his mom was riding with him and had to tug the horse along.
The cowboys all came in on horses as well.
The Clown
The first event – Bull riding
Next up – Calf Roping
I don’t have a high speed camera (designed for sports photography) so it was hard to focus on fast moving objects, but a few turned out decent for my skill level. It makes it harder with some of these events because you have 30 seconds or less from the time they leave the gate to the time it’s over so you don’t have any time to focus your camera on the moving objects and there were no good objects at the right distance to focus on ahead of time!
Bronco Riding
They are judged on a number of things (not sure what they are) but they have to stay on the horse for a certain amount of time. If they don’t fall off first, another rider rides up beside the bronco rider and the cowboy transfers to the other horse.
I wish this was in better focus because it was my favorite action shot.
The darker it got, the harder it got!
Steer Wrestling
In this event 2 riders come in, one on either side of the steer. The job of one is to keep the steer running a straight line to make it easier for the other cowboy to jump from his horse and wrestle the steer to the ground. There is history behind these events, but for the sake of time I will let you study up on your own if you want to know why cowboys would do such crazy things.
They also had team roping, tie down roping, and some cowgirls participated in barrel racing. I didn’t get photos of those events.
A good time was had by all.
p.s. there were no serious injuries that I know of
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