We decided to have a couple of full rest days here in Glasgow, MT, to let the knees recover and watch the Rodeo. We started with a large breakfast of pancakes or biscuits and gravy to break from the usual porridge. Jake and Owen went down to the fair grounds out of curiosity to watch the "Cowboy Church Service" while I cracked on with some admin back at the campsite/ hotel. They returned with quotes such as "A gun and kind words are better than kind words alone. Amen."
A buffet lunch at the restaurant meant we all suffered from eyes bigger than our stomachs and we were summarily defeated by the large American plates. It was nice then to use the rare internet access to get back in touch with family and friends back home. Meanwhile Jake and Owen had another interesting encounter with a couple in the hotel lobby who proposed that due to Americas recent legalisation of gay marriage the US was going to go into economic collapse before getting invaded by a coalition between Russia, the Middle East (they failed to specify who in the Middle East), China and Japan (who therefore must have reconciled their differences with China and broken down its strong relationship with the US in the last 3 days - we miss out on all the news over here...). Interested to see how far this conversation would go they took on a Louis Theroux style approach to questioning them, asking innocent questions to open them up further. The US would be occupied by the coalition for 7 years. Their source? A Romanian man they met earlier in the week.
Back to reality, we went down to watch the main Rodeo that evening. There was a large line up of events beginning with mostly events where the men had to subdue a cow or steer from horseback using either lassos, their bare hands or both. It then moved on to Barrel Racing where women tested their riding skill and the agility of their horses to circle three barrels in the arena in the quickest time possible. Bareback and saddle bronc riding saw plenty of men getting thrown around, and then the bull riding saw them getting thrown off faster. Unlike the bull running and ring events I have seen in Spain, the bulls here appeared to have their horns clipped to blunt them, making it relatively safer. They rounded off with a Wild Horse Race, where a team of three had to catch a wild horse, saddle it, one would then ride it around a pole (he would cling on for dear life long enough for the horse to run around the pole by its own accord) then jump off with the saddle (less graceful than you might imagine) then race the saddle back to the judges. This was entertaining as it mostly consisted of two or three men in cowboy rig getting dragged around the arena on their fronts by a rather disgruntled horse!
Tomorrow we are having another full day off to rest and checking out the local museum and the town.
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