IT'S RODEO TIME IN HOUSTON

Wednesday, March 12 – We attended the self-proclaimed largest rodeo in the world today – The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. It is held at the Reliant Center which is the indoor stadium of the Houston Texans NFL team, the Reliant Arena, and the Houston Astrodome,which will be demolished in the future. This is a huge facility located just east of the downtown area.

Parking at our daughter's apartment in Mid-town, we rode the mass transit train to the Reliant Center. This is a nice way to travel, missing all the traffic from the thousands of people driving to the Rodeo and the $20 parking fee. The train dropped us off just a few hundred feet from the Reliant Center Exhibition Hall.

Our first stop was checking out the vendors. We enjoy this part of the festivities. We even bought a couple items, a Houston Rodeo T-shirt for Paul and a pair of high tech gardening shears for Marsha. We walked through the 100's of vendors, which are mostly cowboy/cowgirl related. You could sure spend a few bucks on some nice cowboy boots!

Plenty of bling for the gals.

For some reason, Paul thought he might be able to put a pair of stirrups to good use…oh dear.

Two very interesting fountains.

Every Texan knows what part of the cow the brisket comes from. Do you?
 

Marsha bought a chain from one of the vendors several years ago. The gal then told her the chain is guaranteed for life. Well, we all know how that goes. So, Marsha decided to see if this was true. Her chain had tarnished and asked the gal how she could get another. The gal looked at the chain, recognized it immediately and gave her  new sparkling chain for her cross – FREE! No questions asked. Now that is a vendor we will deal with any day!

We then walked over to see the livestock and were a little disappointed that only the goats were in attendance today. Not sure why, but the cattle, hogs, llamas, and other animals weren't here yet. Maybe it has to do with the rodeo lasting nearly a month. The animals must come in different waves.

This little boy asked Marsha if she wanted to pet his goat. “Of course,” she said. He then began to explain why they have that thing over their mouth and why they were all wearing coats. The goats were being judged on Thursday and Friday, and their coats needed to stay pretty. Also, he explained in great detail how goats like to eat everything. He said the thing over their mouth is only taken off when they give them their “good” food. They didn’t want them eating anything bad and throwing it up when they were getting judged. He was such a cutie. (Marsha’s words, not Paul’s.)

The kids area was very crowded. Remember, it's Spring Break for the schools in Texas, so many families take advantage of the time to attend the Rodeo. Also, Wednesday is $10 Day. A bargain that includes everything at the Rodeo including the nightly concert.

The kids area is like a petting zoo full of farm animals. The really neat aspect is there are several displays of baby animals being born. If you can't get close enough to the pen to see the action, don't worry because everything is displayed on large screen TV's. Amazing!

Yes, Marsha got her fix with the little chicks. Each time we come she needs to watch them being born.

Wow, look at the size of those feet.

We then rode the tram over to the horse arena to attend the Junior Horse Agility Competition. Some of these girls can really ride. A little scary for the parents, one would think. This was a very enjoyable competition.

We even found something for Kelly. Her colors for the wedding are purple and silver. If she decides to ride a horse to the reception, this would fit right in with her color scheme.

We stopped at one of the hundreds of food tents for a quick lunch on the way to the stadium for the Championship Rodeo. This was Round 3 with an eventual purse of $50,000 going to the winner. There was bucking bronco riding, bull back riding, calf roping, chuck wagon races, a horse agility competition, and a calf scramble. Tell you all about that in the next post.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all back real soon. Have a great day!

BACK TO BRAZOS BEND STATE PARK

March 11, 2014 – With a near perfect weather day, we decided to take a couple hikes at nearby Brazos Bend State Park. Located about 20 miles southwest of Houston, we last visited this park two years ago.

Brazos has many different attractions including camping, biking trails, picnic areas, fishing piers, playgrounds, an observatory and of course hiking. Oh yea, and ALLIGATORS!

We hiked a couple of the trails including the Hale Lake Loop (2-miles), Bluestem Trail (1-mile), Pilant Slough Trail (1.5-miles), Elm Lake Loop (2.5-miles) and part of the 40-Acre Lake Trail (1.2-miles). There are over 25 miles of hiking trails in Brazos, we hiked only a small fraction of the available trails.

Did we say alligators? We saw alligators on both the Hale Lake and 40-Acre Lake trails.

With all the rain we have had, Hale Lake is still very low.

The 40-Acre Lake trail circles the lake with dozens of alligators sunning themselves all along its banks. We saw one very large gator – probably the biggest we've ever seen.

A very big lazy gator at 40-Acre Lake.

Oh, that sun feels so good.

All the trails were nearly deserted of other hikers. That surprised us, because all of Texas schools are on Spring Break either this week or next. We think is was one of those cases where the number of hikers quickly diminishes as you move farther and farther from the trail head. We did find a slew of hikers around the 40-Acre Lake trail. This is a very popular trail with parking right next to the lake. We found mom, dad, and the kids enjoying Spring Break vacation all around the lake. Nice to see them outside and enjoying nature.

We saw so many different kinds of birds. What a wonderful treat! Both of us together know so little about birds. Judy knows more in her little pinky than we know in our entire bodies. We are going to take our best shot at identifying some of the lovelies. Please let us know if we have labeled any incorrectly. We are always in a learning mode.

Blue Heron

White Ibis

Yellow-crowned night-heron bird?

Of course, the turtles were out in full force. We love the way they stretch their little necks up to the sun.

We stopped at the visitors center, which of course was pretty crowded but not beyond being enjoyable. There are numerous wild animal displays including bobcats, alligators, snakes, spiders, turtles and more. We even got to crowd in line with the kids and pet a baby alligator!

We both got to pet our first six-month old baby gator…very soft.

The flowers are beginning to bloom. So much beauty in one place.

We enjoyed our afternoon at Brazos Bend and will definitely return in the future. We recommend this fun park to anyone when visiting the Houston area.

See the gator in the background?

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all back real soon. Have a great day!

LUNCH WITH JANICE AND DAVE

Saturday, March 8 – We awoke to crazy weather on Tuesday with cold and rain. This winter weather continues to amaze us and local Houstonians. If we've heard it once, we've heard it a hundred times that this is very unusual weather for Houston. Guess most of the nation would agree.

We have plans on meeting fellow full-time RV'ers and bloggers, Janice & Dave of Ready To Go Full Time RVing, for lunch. They texted and asked if we wanted to reschedule, but we decided to go ahead with our planned lunch. We thought a little rain shouldn't cause us to change plans, but never realized trees on the west side of Houston were coated with ICE.

We made a quick stop at our favorite used bookstore in Katy and were shocked to see all the limbs down from the heavy coating of ice. As we traveled the few more miles to the restaurant we were surprised with the ice coating all the trees. Beautiful and thank-goodness it was only on the trees and not the highways.

This was our first time eating at a Genghis Grill, and we loved it.

We were given a metal bowl when seated. We then served ourselves from a selection of meats, vegetables, spices, and sauces. Lastly, we selected among several choices of rice or noodles. We gave our bowl to the cook to stir fry the contents into a delicious meal.

The prices are reasonable; the service was outstanding. The company was delightful. We enjoyed sharing travel stories and travel plans with Janice and Dave and hope to meet again sometime down the road.

After lunch we were happy to see weather conditions hadn't deteriorated. It continued to rain (Houston received over an inch of rain today.) causing some uncomfortable driving conditions especially with the Houstonians being unfamiliar to bad weather driving, but we arrived back to the RV without any problems.

With temperatures hovering around the upper 30's, we stayed at home the rest of the day. With the blue flame heater keeping us warm, Bella showed us how to catch a cat nap to pass the afternoon away.

Here is where Bella spends the cold days.

Did anyone else out there see the ring around the Sun on Friday? The ring is known as a 22 degree halo or a sun halo. The ring is caused by sunlight passing through ice crystals in cirrus clouds within the Earth's atmosphere. The crystals bend direct sunlight, projecting it elsewhere into the sky, and at a certain angle -- you guessed it, 22 degrees -- a halo can be seen around the sun. Rings around the sun have been used in the past to predict the stormy weather. It was beautiful.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see y’all back real soon. Have a great day!