Cowboy Festival

It's April, and in SClarita, that means it's time for the Cowboy Festival! Stace and I love this annual event, and were happy to return after taking a two-year hiatus. (We were in England last year and had a 2-month-old the year before...)
We volunteered for the city-run event in an area designed to entertain children. Stace helped kids throw a lasso around a metal calf (if you blow this photo up, you can see it a lot better). I helped in the area right next to his...
...where little ones (and bigger ones) could ride rocking horses with real saddles. Cora loved this area, and we visited it several times.
The Cowboy Festival is held at Melody Ranch in Placerita Canyon, where countless movies and television shows (including the HBO series Deadwood) have been filmed over the decades.
In the couple of years since we last attended, the organizers have added some great activities for kids. Besides the area where we helped, in the pioneer living exhibit (above), they could pan for gold, play with folk toys, grind cornmeal and cut biscuit dough. It was fun and informative, with the static displays teaching all about what life was like for the Westerners of the 1800s.
Also new this year was an exhibit on the Buffalo Soldiers, the African-American U.S. Army soldiers of the 19th and early 20th century. Re-enactors set up a mock army camp, and Cora was able to pet one of their horses. This was another great exhibit, and I would have loved to have spoken to the re-enactors further but it was a little hard with Cora wanting to run around.
Stace and I volunteered at the festival on Saturday, and on Sunday he played golf and I took Cora back to the ranch. We listened to some music, did the gold-panning and had kettle corn - above, Cora is feeding her new pet horse some kettle corn.
Grandma and Grandpa, whose festival volunteerism led to our own involvement, got Cora her new little friend, whom she's trying to lasso above.

Cora was a very good girl at the festival, and it was fun to watch some live music with her. She really enjoyed listening to the Western Swing trio Hot Club of Cowtown; their final song sounded like a locomotive, and Cora immediately picked up on it and said, "Choo choo train!" The weather was perfect - though some years it's scorching (and it was boiling earlier in the week), this weekend was cooler.

Here's Cora panning for gold: