The Calgary Stampede is an annual rodeo, exhibition and festival held every July in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The ten-day event, which bills itself as “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth”,^[3] attracts over one million visitors per year and features one of the world’s largest rodeos, a parade, midway, stage shows, concerts, agricultural competitions, chuckwagon racing and First Nations exhibitions.

The event’s roots are traced to 1886 when the Calgary and District Agricultural Society held its first fair. In 1912, American promoter Guy Weadick organized his first rodeo and festival, known as the Stampede. He returned to Calgary in 1919 to organize the Victory Stampede in honour of soldiers returning from World War I. Weadick’s festival became an annual event in 1923 when it merged with the Calgary Industrial Exhibition to create the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede.

Thankyou Wikipedia! : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary_Stampede

Greg and I visited the Stampede on the Thursday & the last Sunday. Both of us really enjoyed our time throughout the event… I’m not gonna lie I was most excited about the food and the horses!

 

 

As you can see we REALLY enjoyed the food, there was so much more to try but everything was so damn expensive minim prices starting at at least $7 for not much at all…..  We did try a few other things  forgetting to take a photo of the Poutine  a Canadian staple with fries, gravy and cheese curd… Greg was not too keen and I have yet to have any ‘fries’ or Chips as we Aussie call them that are better that what you get back home, Its seems Australia definitely does deep fried potato best! The other thing not pictured was the giant bucket of mini cinnamon doughnuts we also devoured during the 4 hours of the evening show…. oops (oh so delicious).

Now for some photos of the actual Stampede……

 

The Stampede is a lot of fun but very busy, people everywhere! It’s also quite expensive as mentioned before with tickets to enter being $18 once inside there is the temptation of all the delicious and expensive food as well as the rides (which we didn’t do) and the attractions such as the Rodeo and the evening show, each of which you also pay for. Rodeo tickets start from $28 to sit or $14 to stand, we opted for standing tickets as it was a lot cheaper. In hindsight sitting would have been a better choice for view and photo’s as the bars were in the way so it was hard to get a nice shot also standing for 3 hours was tough! This aside the Rodeo was amazing! The transitions through the many events very quick and the whole show super exciting I really loved it!

The Evening show tickets to sit were also $28 upwards and standing $16 we bought our night show standing tickets at the same time as the rodeo and after all that time standing I was not looking forward to standing for another 3 hours straight how I wish we had brought the sitting tickets! We took it in our stride thought and stuck it out later nabbing an old wooden table right near the fence to sit on for the rest of the night show! The Chuck wagon races were nothing to get too excited about but the evening show was amazing, very well put together with amazing music, choreography and costumes. We thoroughly enjoyed it and it was again so worth the money!

Here are just a few of the photo’s from the Rodeo & the Evening Show!

 

We attended the Stampede again on the last Sunday getting there before noon to get in for free. Today we had time to catch the dog show, so much fun watching all the rescue dogs do such clever tricks!

 

It rained a lot on Sunday so we opted for many of the indoor activities so as not to get soaked! We visited the horses in the barn again and enjoyed watching a natural horsemanship show, as well as the heavy horse pull which was very impressive!

We finished the night staying for the FREE Simple Plan show, which was awesome! Such great entertainers and a whole concert for free!

We hope you enjoyed this blog as much as we enjoyed out time at the Stampede!

N&G

XO