RODEO
Ft. Worth, TX Arcadia, FL

Photographs and Commentary
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Fort Worth, TX

22 January 2012

We spent the weekend of January 21, 2012 in the Dallas, TX area. Susie had to attend committee meetings at the American Library Association Mid-Winter Meeting. Her meetings were on Saturday and on Sunday we attended the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, an indoor event, with our friends, Bobbie and Bob Athey. This was our first experience with a rodeo.

The Fort Worth Rodeo is one of the oldest continuous rodeos in the county, dating back to 1896. I, as usual, took my camera and shot over 500 pictures in the span of two hours. A lot of these pictures were rapid fire shots so that I could catch the action of the events. Having shot that many many pictures it took me much longer than usual to weed them down and edit them for this page. Honestly, since we are currently stationary in Sarasota, FL for most of the winter, I was also not under the pressure we have in our travels to get a page up every night .

In March we will be going to a rodeo in nearby (60 miles) Arcadia, FL. I plan to add pictures from that rodeo to this page.




   
   
   
   
   
 
 
   
 
   
   

Arcadia, FL

9 March 2012

In March we went, along with some friends, to the All Florida Professional Championship in Arcadia, FL. Arcadia is located about an hour east of our RV Park in Sarasota and is also known as the "antiquing Capital" of Florida. Its main street is lined with antique shops.

The rodeo grounds in Arcadia fit my image of a rodeo more so than the one in Ft. Worth. It is an outdoor venue, and it is a bit more compact so you feel closer to the action. Susie had worked the Internet and had spoken to people at the rodeo office to get us what we thought were ideal seats, right behind the chutes where the broncs and bulls are mounted. When we got to our assigned seats, we found someone occupying them. Susie and one of the occupants of the seats went to the rodeo office to resolve the issue. The president of the Rodeo Association resolved the problem. He allowed the people occupants of the seats to keep them and "banished" us to the VIP section which gave us an ideal view of the action and provided free food and drink (we didn't complain).

I thought that I went a little crazy taking over 500 pictures at Ft Worth. By the time I got done at Arcadia I shot 1504 pictures in a little over two hours. The problem with taking that many is culling them down to a presentable (not boring) series of pictures. It took me two months to bring the collection down to 102 picures. Instead of placing the pcitures individually on the Web page, I decided to create a slide show. My first pass at a slide show resulted in a 120 Mb file which would have taken several minutes to load on the Web browser. The slide show that I finally created is still a large file but takes a lot less time to load. to view the slide show, click here.