Wagons Ho and Spanish Market

I finally got Joe Btfsplk to leave me alone and the rest of the weekend was a good time! Guitar and Too Tall-Two Timing showed up with their rigs...and ladies at about 7 pm Friday night. It took about forty-five minutes to get everyone situated and unhitched and we immediately started thinking about dinner. Guitar had made some chili and brought that along so all we needed to do was to heat it up.

We decided to christen Too Tall-Two Timing and K's brand new trailer with dinner and the five of us packed in and then packed it in! The chili really hit the spot and I even went for seconds. For some reason K has decided that the inside of their very nice trailer was a "no photo" zone so I don't have any pictures to show you of this nights festivities. Suffice to say that we did enjoy ourselves but called it a night by about 10 pm.

Saturday morning I had to drive back to the Denver area to help out at the Spanish Market and Mountain Man Rendezvous at The Fort Restaurant. The Fort is a reproduction of Bents Old Fort, a fur trading outpost in the 1840s, outside La Junta Colorado. The restaurant version has been in business since 1963 and is a perfect setting for an event like this.

I manned the ticket booth from 10 am till 1 pm. The Bride had to take a college course test that morning and then met me for a late lunch and to check out the event. There were a number of Southwest artisans displaying and selling their wares. A group of dancers entertained the crowd by doing Mexican folk dances. One dance they did with an odd number of men and an even number of women. The man without a partner danced with a broom. He would dance between the men and women and then drop the broom and grab a woman. The unlucky man that wasn't quick enough to get a woman dancing partner then had to dance with the broom. Kinda like dancing musical chairs.

There were also some vendors that were part of the mountain man rendezvous. They sold period clothing, hats, iron works and a variety of other things.

While all this sissy stuff was going on, the mountain men were doing manly mountain man stuff...like competing in hatchet throws and shooting events. You could see that some of the participants were really into authenticity. One thing that I found amusing was the guy in the picture shooting his period long rifle. He was going for authentic but still wore shooting glasses to protect his eyes.

After looking everything over, The Bride and I headed back up to the mountains to join the rest of the circle. I'll tell you about the rest of the weekend in the next post.

Thanks for visiting.