October’s Big Adventure: Cedar City

For a quick fall break trip, we headed south to Cedar City to see their authentic western Fall Festival, and we took mom along with us!  We had just two days there, but it was enough to really get a taste of honest-to-goodness cowboy livin’, alive and well in Cedar City, USA.
 
The Big Yellow Inn
One highlight of the trip was staying at the Big Yellow Inn — my first ever bed and breakfast stay.  This “Elegant Georgian Revival” was somehow both charming and tacky at the same time.  We loved seeing all the different theme rooms, all overstuffed with related decor, but at the same time….it was just way too much stuff.  Comically so.  Nevertheless, staying here made the trip so much more unique and memorable–which is probably the two things I look for most in a trip!
 
I took A TON of pictures of the inn.  (In the future, hopefully I will be able to cull this down a little.)


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
We stayed in “the Safari Room”, and while it was absolutely packed with knick-knacks, it was also really fun and atmospheric!

 
 

One perk of staying here was access to a full kitchen!  Jac cooked our dinners each night here, and we played games before and after eating.  This definitely beats cooking on our little camp stove, then doing the dishes in the bathroom sink!

 
 

Here’s our dinner the third night:  salmon, rice and vegetables.  YUM!


 
I have stayed away from bed and breakfasts because I had thought it would require me to be social with the owners and other guests.  And I wasn’t wrong about that.  But what I WAS wrong about was not liking that part! It was actually really fun to talk with the inn’s owners (about the history of the inn, about Cedar City, about collecting “antiques” for the inn) and with the other guests (about why they were visiting and what they did back home.)  Below is a picture of mom having fun chatting it up with the inn’s owner and a guest.   🙂
 
 
 
I’m not saying we’ll stay at a lot more bed and breakfasts, but I do concede that it was actually really a lot of fun.  
 
Cedar Livestock Heritage Festival
The main reason we went to Cedar City was not to stay at the bed and breakfast. We went to see the Cedar Livestock Heritage Festival — a gen-u-ine, small-town, country-livin’, tractor-showin’, horse-ridin’, cattle-wrestlin’, prized-jam-makin’, quilt-displayin’ country festival. I didn’t see ANY of this growing up in greater Los Angeles. I couldn’t wait!!! Mom and Jac were likely not as excited about it as I was, but they went along with it and said it was fun afterward. And it was!  
 
Sheep Parade
The ‘highlight’ of the weekend, and what first convinced me we HAD to go, was the annual sheep parade, when local herders corral and lead their sheep down from the high mountain ranges, thru downtown, en route to the desert for winter. The first sheep were herded through town in 1870, and every year since then they have made the trek from the
mountain to the valley making their way through Cedar City.

 
This was such a crazy, fun sight to behold — hundreds of sheep, walking all together through the center of town, seemingly oblivious to the thousands of people lining the streets starting at them.

 
And
what made it even cooler was that everyone became silent as the sheep
passed, so you could hear hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hooves
clopping along the pavement, and an occassional bleat being called out
here and there.   
 
But that wasn’t all.  While the highlight of the parade was definitely the sheep, there were other country fair type participants in the parade as well.  Big horn cattle were led down the street as well:
 

 and antique tractors:


and cute itty bitty horses (with little shoes on):

 

and modern-day massive farm machinery:

 

and horses pulling historic covered wagons:

 
 
 It was the quintessential farm life parade, and I loved every minute of it!

Fall Festival
After the parade was through, everyone headed over to the county fair grounds for more livestock-related displays and activities. And wow, this event was so much more authentic then I had even hoped for.  It was clearly a festival FOR and BY locals who were sharing their CURRENT livelihoods and skills, not just celebrating things of a bigone era. And that made the whole experience so much more engaging! We saw….
 
cattle sortin’ competitions:

 
 
cattle ropin’ and wrestlin’ competitions:


loads of real, bonafide cowboys on their trusty steads:

 
 
and even kids versions of the contests, which were SO adorable (and actually made it clear to us how HARD this actually is to do!)


 
Them lil’ cowpoke were doin’ some fancy goat roapin’:

 
 
and ‘horse’ ridin’ (hobby horse):


We couldn’t help but get in the spirit of things.  Here’s Jac sweet talking a pretty blonde mare:

 

And here’s me ‘test driving’ a cherry red tractor. Yee haw!

 
 
We saw other stuff too. We saw a demonstration of how sheep dogs move a heard of sheep:

 
and how a sheep is sheared by a professional shearer:


We heard some cowboy poetry (which could have been fun to listen to but I couldn’t get past the country-boy accent):
 
 
 
saw some beautifully creative handmade quilts on display:
 
 

and saw a dutch oven bake off (which we decided not to partake of, but it did look interesting): 


 
There were loads of booths selling all manner of items needed by your modern cowboy and cowgirl:

 

and there were sheephearder wagons on display–from basic, tiny old wagons to new, huge, fancy ones.
 


Those were fun to peak inside, and know that they really do still get used by sheep farmers to sleep out near their grazing sheep flocks.


It was a really fun, unique experience. It made me think that given a different set of life circumstances, I could have really liked living a more country lifestyle.  I mean, look at these cute little faces:

 
 

But there’s more….
Of course the sheep parade and fall festival were not all we did. No Betsy-planned-trip would be complete without lots of side-trips added on.  (Because variety is the spice of life, no?) So in addition to catching all the magic of the Fall Parade and Festival, we also visited these locations:


We visited the Frontier Homestead Museum to learn more about the early settlement of the area and life of the residents. It was a very well done museum, packed full of interesting historical items, like these authentic old wagons:


and a school house (transported to this location):


The museum also had hands on activities too. We fed the chickens

and tried our hand at roping some stationery cattle (so hard!)

Mom even added one additional hands-on activity — she dead-headed the roses that were sorely in need of some attention. 🙂

Before leaving, Jac and I competed in a speed word search contest. He won. Good job Jac!


We also visited Cedar Breaks National Monument, but it was so incredibly freezing cold and windy that we only spent a few minutes there before deciding it wasn’t worth it!


And we drove a little bit into Zion National Park’s Kolob Terrace section, but unfortunately the last bit of the road was closed due to a recent rockslide so we didn’t get to see it all. Next time!


Such a fun trip!
In all, it was such a fun trip….and was made all the more fun with mom there too!  Hopefully she can come on more of our adventures with us in the future. 🙂