I lurched over to the Hunter Jumper competition this morning and had a great time taking pictures and watching the horses do their thing.

I consider the rodeo the easiest place to take pictures, all I have to do is find one good spot and most of the action will happen in that general area. But if I did that with the jumping horses, I would get the same picture every time....different horse, same picture.

So taking pictures of the Hunter Jumpers takes a lot more walking, and a little more effort. Since this is an outdoor contest it also requires a bit more creativity to try and keep the sun behind me.

As usual I really enjoy these amateur contests because I can walk around and take pictures anywhere I like as long as I don't get in the way, or frighten the horses with my homeless bum disguise.

                                            Theboondork

This is mainly a family affair, mostly because it doesn't interest anyone but your family.

You get the feeling that everybody knows everybody else, and the name of everybody else's horse.

It's more of a picnic atmosphere than a cutthroat competition.

They have four or five different Hunter Jumper arenas here at the Pima County Fairgrounds, so I guess its pretty popular but I'm not sure exactly why.

I'm pretty sure I could jump over all of this stuff without the horse.... In fact I would prefer it without the horse.

If you know what you're doing the horses look pretty graceful jumping over things. But if you don't know what you're doing the horses look worse than you do.

I think one of the reasons I enjoy watching Barrel Racing so much is they want to win, and they want to win bad. But the Hunter Jumpers  seem like they're happy just to be here.

I'm not sure how this competition is judged. It's not for speed, and it's not just to get over the jump, because if you miss one you can turn around and do it again.

The only thing I can figure is its got something to do with how good you look while doing it.

There really wasn't much to choose from in the van department. There was only four or five more vans than this at the whole show.

I moseyed over to the building where the vans for the RV show were and only found eight or ten vans to look at, which was considerably less than last year about this time. I didn't expect to find many vans, but I sure thought it would be more than this. And right outside the door of that event center were exactly two of the class C's that were small enough to be of interest to me. And as for small trailers, I found exactly one.

So it was slim pickens for small RVs to look at. It looked to me like they kept a representative copy of their small RVs so the customer would have something to look at, and back-ordered all the rest.

The news was much better when it came to the horses. I talked to some horse people this morning and they confirmed they're having a Hunter Jumper competition this weekend, so at least I'll get a picture of a horse doing something besides standing still. It's starting to look like I know more about what's going on around here, at least when it comes to horses, than the hosts that work here.

The place is also really busy with all of the dinosaur people driving through. But I imagine it won't really get busy until this weekend when all the kids are out of school. It does make me wish I could take the grandkids to see the dinosaurs, but I don't see Denver mentioned as one of their future shows.

                                           Theboondork

One of the nice Mercedes vans. They do look high-class, and even has what I would call a real refrigerator that I don't have to crawl up to on my hands and knees.

The picture is not really as long as it looks, I was using a wide angle lens this morning to get as much of the interior as I could. But despite that, I could live in this, I would just miss my diesel engine and four-wheel-drive.

The Dodge Ram's are the cheapest vans, once you step into the Mercedes vans, things get real expensive real quick, but they sure are nice.

See that big black box on the end of the cabinet? That's the refrigerator. And when I first saw it there I thought to myself... Self, that will be easy to load up with groceries while in the Walmart parking lot.

But then I got to thinking about how I'm going to get to the refrigerator when the sliding van door is closed. The refrigerator door opens the wrong way, and the floors not even level  where I'm going to be crawling around on my hands and knees trying to get to the fridge.

Of course everything is a trade-off, but trading my refrigerator for a glorified ice chest would be tough to deal with.

I guess this bed would work for me, crossways like that, if it's a little more than 6 feet wide, but I'm not sure that it is.

This is the smallest RV that I saw at the show. It was kind of stuck off in a corner by itself. I guess this RV dealer doesn't sell any of the all fiberglass, rolling egg, kind of trailers.

The horses are in town. And the Hunter, jumpers, start hunting and jumping first thing tomorrow morning.

Tucson boondocking sunrise..... That's right, I stuck my camera out the door, took the picture, and went back to bed.

I forgot to mention yesterday that the drive-through dinosaur thing is being held right here at the Fairgrounds a couple of blocks from where I'm boondocked. But despite its proximity, I'm still not that interested in dinosaurs.

I walked over to the RV show and there were some great RVs there, but most of them are uninteresting to me. Once I figured out that I want something smaller than what I've got, and I don't think I want to have to tow anything again, and I have very little money, that narrows down my interests a lot.

So as I'm walking around looking at all the RVs, if I mentally delete everything that doesn't fit the above mentioned criteria, there's not much left except the carts the RV salesman are riding around in, and I'm not sure I could even afford a new one of those.

But overall I would say that the RV show is about half what it was when I was here last Spring. And I would attribute that to simply not having enough stock on hand to fill the place up.

I believe they moved all of the vans that would be of interest to me, to one of the indoor event centers which I haven't visited yet. Last Spring they had enough vans on display to put in the indoor event center, and a bunch of them outdoors... Times have changed.

Good news on the horse show front. As I walked around looking at RVs early this morning, I saw a sign with a big arrow that said "HORSE SHOW," pointing off in another direction. This is great news to me, because it wasn't there the day before. Now it's still not for sure yet, and I probably won't know till the contestants start arriving, but its looking good.

 I was really hoping it was going to be a Barrel Race because that's a lot more interesting to me, but it looks like it's going to be a Hunter Jumper contest full of jodhpurs and Derby hats.

Whatever it is at least there will be some horses to take pictures of that will be jumping over things. The event will be Saturday and Sunday if they're actually going to do it. But it looks like there's a pretty good chance now, but I won't know for sure until the contestants start showing up Friday afternoon.

                                              Theboondork

It looks like there's a lot of fifth wheels here but they're actually just spread far apart so they take up the same amount of space with half the number of RVs.

Same thing with the class A's. They just don't have many vehicles to show. But they're making money hand over fist with all the back-orders they've got.

There are dozens of rosebushes here at the Fairgrounds, but there's only two that actually have a bunch of flowers on them. This rosebush is about 7 feet tall.