The day started off with a first for me: a trip to IHOP. I had heard stories about how this place rocked, and although I had attempted to go to one in my last trip to Pittsburgh, it was on a Sunday morning and there was a very large church crowd resulting in a 45 minute wait. We couldn't wait that long, so this was my chance to finally go.
When we got there I thought it was going to be a similar situation, because there were about 12 people sitting in the waiting area. We went up to the person taking the names and said, we have 4 and a baby carrier. She said "Right this way!" It's one of those things you don't ask about.
Whenever I go to breakfast places for the first time, I have a habit of ordering things that look like they'll be good, but then turn out to be terrible mistakes. This time I ordered the Cinna-stack. It's a stack of four pancakes with cinnamon bun filling in between each one. It was good for the first bite, but became worse with every bite as the cinnamon built up on my taste buds. I only ate about half of it. Next time I'll just get regular french toast.
Breakfast was over and we were ready to start the real day, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. We drove to the heart of Houston and found a spot to park for $10 that was a few long blocks away from the event. Anything closer was either $15 or $20 bucks for parking. The weather was sunny and 75 degrees, and that's Texas degrees, which I'd peg at around 90 in Erie weather.
The walk from the car was about 10 minutes to the ticket gates (and that was from the $10 parking spots) so the first thing that we wanted to do was get into one of the buildings where we could get some shade. Here's a picture of us while we were heading to the building that housed the livestock section of the event.
You could tell we were approaching the right area as the air started to smell like the zoo, in that manurey way. It was a convention center filled with cows, rabbits, and farming equipment. I'm not going to pretend to know what the purpose of a livestock show is, but there were a lot of owners with their best animals. Some of these cows had price tags of over $300,000.
The array of John Deere and International equipment filled a large section of the room. Carol requested this picture of me leaning against a tractor. Something about a country song...
Once we had risked the cleanliness of our shoes for long enough it was time to grab something to eat before heading in to the rodeo. Carol and I split a burger, fries and a drink for $15, Scott bought a corndog for $9 and Katie bought some chips on a stick. Those prices might sound ridiculous, and to some extent they are, but everything down here is "Texas-sized." You can see some of the corndog here.
The rodeo was a collection of events that I'd never seen in person and certainly didn't know how the judges scored. Each category had 10 people to start which they got down to 4, then after all the events were complete the restarted with just the final 4 to find the winners. Carol and I started playing a game where we'd pick a name from the list and see who's contestant did better. She crushed me with 7 of her 10 picks beating mine. We were really high up in this giant stadium so I didn't get many great photos, here's one of them getting ready for the next thing.
After all the events were completed, there were some kid friendly ones which were pretty hilarious. My favorite one was when they had 30 kids around 10 years old and they released about a dozen calves. The kids had to catch them and bring them to the middle of the arena. They tried headlocks and tailgrabbing, but the funniest was when they would grab one of the tails and the calf would just keep running and drag them through the dirt. Another one was for the younger children, probably around 4-5 year olds. They had to hug the back of a sheep and see how long they could hold on.
When all the kids had their fun it was time to set up the stage for the Brad Paisley concert. Since it was in a stadium, the stage was in the middle of everyone, Super Bowl half time show style. The cool thing about this stage was that it slowly spun around for the entire concert so it would face everyone. Here they are setting it up.
Now, before I show the next picture, I just want to say that this place was pretty big. We were told by the announcer that there were 73,800 there that night. It's big enough that when the concert was starting, they set off fireworks inside the building.
And then the concert started. Let me say this about Brad Paisley, he's not one of those bands that sucks when they're live. He sounds the same as his CDs. Here's a few photos to finish this very long post.
Later today, I'll post what we did yesterday. That's all for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment