Colorful parade, delicious food and great music

Houston Rodeo only starts on Tuesday, but the parade takes place on the Saturday before. So we headed out early Saturday morning to find a space to sit/stand along the route through Houston Downtown, in walking distance from our hotel. Breakfast consisted of tamales from a street vendor. It's also a tradition that before the parade the Rodeo Race starts: a 10K race, a 5K fun run/walk (for everybody) with over 9,000 participants!

Every February since 1938 Houston is celebrating the Western heritage with a 20 day long rodeo and a 2-hour parade. Besides decorative, colorful floats (especially of organisations and supermarkets) there are high schoon and university marching bands, dance groups, drill teams, official mounted groups like police or military units. The main and most unique participants are thousands of men and women on horseback and in carriages. The floats as well as the trail rides are judged and win awards.

The Trail Ride tradition started in 1952, when four men traveled on horseback from Brenham, Texas, to raise awareness of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. More than 3,000 trail riders, in 11 groups, led by a Trail Boss, take part today and they come from all over Texas. The longest one comes from San Antonio/TX, which is about 240 miles. There are century old wagons drawn by mules, and family members and generations of all ages take part.

The mayor (pic) and many high politicians, committee members and celebrities were on the parade and it was fun to watch. It was mostly the Mexican groups setting up a big show with their "dancing horses", for the rest it was mainly your standard working horses - no glimmer, no glitter - just as it should be for a REAL cowboy/girl.

After the parade we headed out to the fairgrounds, where the BBQ Cookoff took place from Thursday to Saturday. That was completely different from what we had expected: Huge! Like 10 times the Oktoberfest, with large decorated tents set up and operated by companies and organisations, mostly only accessible by invitation. We were so fortunate as to get into the Visit Houston tent and had a wonderful BBQ & seafood lunch there. The BBQ event is a competition at the same time and in the "Judge's Tent" the different BBQ teams (which were selected and had to win several other smaller competitions before) bring in their dishes and get judged.




Adjacent to the tent village (on the rodeo grounds parking lot) is a Carnival (pics above) with rides and entertainment of all kinds, popular with families. It'll be active during the rodeo. We took the streetcar back to our downtown hotel and dressed up to attend the Houston Symphony for a classical concert. The orchestra and their famous young conductor Andres Orozco Estrada (pic) will go on a tour through Europe next week including a couple of concerts in Germany. Famous violinist Hilary Hahn (pic) was joining them and it was a great experience.
Long day packed with a broad variety of different things ,,, love it!