Calgary Stampede

[MikeMac]

In 1912 the Stampede was born from the vision of Guy Weadick. Guy was a "working" cowboy and vaudeville entertainer featured in the traveling wild-west shows that were popular world-wide in the early 1900s.

Today it's morphed into a two week party celebrating the best of the west.

Highlights for me:

Cowboys dance hall - opportunity to party with over 5000 of your closest drunken friends. Best but most expensive experience is one of the private suites on the second floor. Easiest thing to order is bottle service. Food and especially wine choices are limited but the staff is friendly and easy to look at.

Rodeo - some of the best in the world high dollar prizes so we can attract the top performers both human and livestock

Food- basically Beer, BBQ and novelty items from the largest BBQ IN in the world to scorpion pizza many of the novelty food items are not local but travel from fair to fair. Something to try are the free pancake breakfasts all over the city basically show up and get all the free coffee, pancakes and bacon you want.

Bigger charity focus- a trend I really like is rather than companies just laying out the food drink and entrainment more and more are asking for a donation to a charity as the price of admission.

[Smithy]

MikeMac, do you have any particular favorite foods or drinks from the big time? Any photos to share?

What is scorpion pizza? Surely not a pizza with fried scorpions? :-)

[Tri2Cook]

What is scorpion pizza? Surely not a pizza with fried scorpions? :-)

Actually, it is a pizza topped with scorpions. They also have one topped with mealworms and crickets. Still doesn't make up for their broadcast running late last night and pre-empting the first 45 minutes of the evening broadcast of the Tour de France though (I work Saturday mornings so can't catch the live morning coverage).