The Royal Easter Show: Part 1

Yesterday was a gray and rainy day, the forecast said that the rain would stop in the afternoon. It was wrong. We had bursts of pouring raining till about 7pm. Of course, this was the day that I chose to go to the Royal Easter Show and wouldn't change my mind because I was way to excited to put it off any longer. Tom and I packed our umbrellas and cameras and headed off to the Olympic Park. I was pretty impressed with how big the whole show was and of course the actual Olympic Park itself.
Due to our hunger we started out in the food area. There was a massive building divided up into pavilions including arts and crafts, paintings, and something with toys.

These displays were in the food pavilion. They are part of a competition that I had seen on TV briefly but had no idea that the displays were so big or on such a steep angle.

This one was the prize winner and it had moving parts. The tractor, water, chickens and sheep. It was pretty awesome. 

Look at those happy sheep, how can you not give them first prize. All the colours are fruit and veggies, there was one display that made a really nice gradation from red to yellow with apples. Very impressive.

In the food pavilion there were many many stalls with everything you could imagine. Cupcakes, wine, honey, super spicy chili sauces, and our choice beef pies and sausage rolls. We warmed ourselves up, got a wee bit of amazing sour candy and headed out to the domestic animal area. We walked through the dog show waiting area, it was a bit funny because at first I was having fun looking at the animals. Then I realized that the whole row was the exact same bred so once I saw one dog I had basically seen them all. We saw a bit of an actual show with the dogs trotting around and looking all frizzy. It was cute.

 The dogs looked a bit bored while they waited.

Next we checked out the Kitten Carnival. They were all playing and looking the same, with squishy faces and tiny eyes. 

Just as we left it started to pour again so we ran into the arena to stay dry and see what was going on. Turned out it was horse jumping. 

 Just behind the big horses was a miniature horse competition.

 Tiny horses. I did feel a bit bad for the competitors of both events. It was really raining hard during this and they had to keep going.

The rest of the events we saw worked out amazingly well in terms of rain timing. They always seemed to keep us just out of the big down pours. We checked out the flower show and I thought there might be a few people that might like to see some of the entries.

Here's first place.

 

 I thought the drum was interesting.

There was a good old pumpkin competition. With a few Simpsons thrown in. 

Next up was the yard dog show.  The breed that they had was a Kelpie which I found out was originally half cattle dog and half dingo and named after the mum of the first litter (the cattle dog of the origin story). It is also apparently the best dog breed for sheep herding because of it's natural instinct. At the end of this show they brought out a little 3 month old pup and she was able to keep the herd in a bunch without any directions from her owner.

This is the set up for the coolest dog herding technique I've ever seen. 

Where did the sheep go from here? 

You better watch this clip. It was incredible to see the dog fearlessly run between the sheep's legs.

This is Buck the star of the show. All the herding dogs sat on hay bales. 

Keeping up with the theme of sheep we were off to the Sheep Shed. I was interested in how exactly the judges were able to grade the wool. I believe all of this wool I was looking at was merino. 

So here are the rams, all hanging out. The one lying down stood up, faced us and started pawing the ground. Very much like it was going to charge. If it was a goat or a bull I would have been worried, however since all the rams were so laid back and used to humans I just took some more photos. 

Baaaaaa!

There were some speeches going on, but what caught my attention were the spaceship bubbles that held the wool that I'm guessing had just been judged.

Tom and I checked out some of the other prize wining wool. An aspect of it that I'd never noticed before was that it is crimped. 

Such fine little zig-zags. 

Here are some of the aspects that wool is judged on. After reading this I imagined that the judging would be a bit funny to watch, lots of measuring.
Washing yield, mean fibre diameter (measured in microns), curvature, staple length and strength, colour, vegetable matter, greasy fleece weight, trueness to type, and my personal favourite comfort factor. No marks for practicality though.

Being around all this wool totally put me in the mood to wear a big fluffy sweater. The chilly weather may have had a part in this too. Next blog will have pigs, cows and giant hotdog men!