all Lindsay, all the time: july 4th

Cody, WY loves the 4th of July. Every single Cody resident we talked to used the exact same words to describe how they felt about it - "it's like Christmas"! My parents live in Cody now (but they don't refer to July 4th as Christmas yet), so we decided to visit them over the holiday weekend and experience all the awesomeness for ourselves.

We arrived on July 1, which is my Dad's birthday, and had a late dinner, opened presents and ate angel food cake (his favorite!). On Thursday we did a little golfing and hung out, then my cousin Michele and her husband Jeff drove up from Denver to spend the weekend also. We had a BBQ on Friday in honor of my Dad's birthday.

Saturday was the main event...are you ready for this?
-Went downtown for the parade in the morning. I'm not sure how long parades are supposed to last, but this one seemed long to me...almost an hour and a half!
-Then went over to a former Senator's house for lunch and met 2 real live Rodeo Queens!
-After lunch we took some short naps then got ready to go to the rodeo
-Headed to the rodeo late afternoon (apparently the Cody Rodeo, called the "Cody Stampede" I think, is a big deal because it was sold out; and out of all the towns in the US, Miss Rodeo America chose to come to Cody!) I think there was something like 6 rodeo queens there - Miss Western Cody, Miss Cody Stampede, Miss Rodeo WY, Miss Rodeo VA, Miss Western Rodeo and Miss Rodeo America. Even though I don't ride horses I decided I'm going to be a rodeo queen someday, I just loved them!
-After the rodeo we had to hurry to make our dinner plans. We were actually invited to the home of the Ambassador to the United Nations for a small country in Italy...very exciting! The Ambassador was very nice and his ranch was beautiful, he even has his own heard of buffalo (and we actually ate one of them for dinner, sad but delicious!)
-After dinner there were fireworks right outside. And we're talking the big fireworks that cities use, except instead of watching them from a mile away they were being set off about 20 feet in front of us. It was fun but also really scary because of the them went off and hit someone...she was fine and thankfully not hurt at all.

Michele and Jeff drove home early Sunday and my parents, Eric and I drove up through the Beartooth Mountains on our way to Billings to catch our plane home. If you've never been through WY/MT I highly recommend it...it's absolutely beautiful!

So that was our holiday weekend, super exciting but I don't think it's as great as Christmas!

Golfing with my parents