On the Road Again with Mrs. V: Ladies Side Saddle last night, and....??? Today

After another "action packed day" yesterday, just too worn out to complete the post so...see you manana!

Last night, Saturday night, we went with our Canadian friends, Karen and Glen, to "The Charro Rodeo". (Ladd had read about this on the Bucerias Amigos forum.) On Saturday nights there is a performance of "The Ladies of Escaramuzas": Ladies (Girls) performing on their horses in Mexican costumes. ("Escaramuzas" translates to "Skirmishers".)

For the more "adventurous" out there, try this link to the interactive googlemap which will land you right at the main entrance of Charro. (the term "main entrance" being rather loosely used in this context).

From there, you can navigate to "downtown" Bucerias and actually "walk" the streets (if only "virtually").
Click on the image at the bottom that says "Las Palmas", turn left and head under the archway on Las Palmas all the way to the end. (Sign will say Decameron resort).
Turn right on Calle Lazaro Cardenas and proceed.
The beach is a block to your left and Centro, straight ahead on Cardenas.

This link (click here) gives some interesting background on the "Ladies" but not the Ladies of Bucerias themselves (they don't appear to have a website of their own - at least not one we could find.
By the way, links appear as orange text in the body of the blog. and will open in a new window when clicked.
When you have finished looking at the link, "X" out the new tab and you'll be returned to the blog right where you left off.

We drove to the location which is only about a five minute drive from the casa. (If we go again we would most likely walk there.) We had no problem finding the spot, but when we arrived the ONLY other beings there were horses. Thinking perhaps we had the wrong location or the wrong day/time, we walked around to explore and to see if anyone was around to ask. As we were walking a truck full of young girls in costumes pulling a trailer with horses arrived. We watched as they unloaded the horses, tied them to trees, and the teen-aged girls touched up their makeup in the rear-view mirrors of the truck! (Teen-aged girls and makeup...it's universal!) Now we were encouraged that we just might be in the right spot. They smiled at us; we smiled at them; and then they drove away leaving the horses there. Hmmmm???

Then some other people, some more performers and horses started coming, and the original group of performers returned. This was indeed the right place/right night, however the starting time was "Mexican time": whenever. LOL

The "Charro Rodeo Ring" is a large ring with tiered cement seats/steps. They eased into the performance with practices, so we had time to interact with the teen-aged and younger Mexican performers who came right up to the audience to smile for pictures. One of the youngest performers was a very pretty 9-year-old girl whose parents were seated behind us. We got a kick out of watching this 9-year-old interact with her parents and friends, and her parents proudly accepted our compliments about their daughter.

There were two teams or clubs of "Ladies of Escaramuzas" that performed, each wearing their own style of costumes and each with their own leader/director. The "ladies" were actually teen-aged girls or younger: las ninas vaqueras. There were also a couple of cute, little boys, los ninos gauchos, who rode around during practices, but did not perform with the girls. The precision horsemanship of the "Ladies" was super! They put on a great show!

Between the performances of the two teams, there was a bull-rider presentation. Uno gaucho, (a very popular gaucho with the teenagers...ha!), came into the ring on a bucking bull. The audience cheered...and then perhaps the bull thought, "Enough of this bucking stuff." He transitioned into a horse and started calmly walking around the perimeter of the ring looking out at the audience as if for approval...all with the embarrassed gaucho still on his back! Maybe this was the comedic part of the show? The audience did indeed laugh. When the rider got off and they tried to get the bull out of the ring, the bull seemed to really want to stay out with the audience: part bull-part horse-large part "ham"?! Ha!

They sold water, beer, and some snacks at the rodeo. Of course it would not be a Mexican outing for us without a beer for Ladd and a try-something-new snack for me! We saw that one popular snack was a relatively flat biscuit-looking treat about the size of a rectangular plate. On this treat they would drizzle lime juice and hot sauce. Yes, I'd like one, please! So Karen and I shared a "Mexican Dorito" as it is called. It was not sweet, but was the perfect biscuit consistency and taste for the lime and hot sauce...yum!

After the show we drove Karen and Glen back to their resort and called it a night.

Sunday, 1/25/15, was a "day of rest" which was truly needed by all three of us! We "hung out" at the casa doing laundry, emails, reading, etc. No worries, though, we still had enough strength to have our "Happy Hour"...LOL!