Stratford A&P Show - Animal Antics and Plenty of fun!

I had to work all day last Saturday Nov 24th so was so glad that we could still attend the Stratford A&P show on Sunday. A&P shows are a long-running tradition here and we likened it to the PNE maybe 30 years ago? Maybe not. In any case, it's a combined trade show for farm equipment and local producers, it's a competition for the best blue-ribbon cows, there's a midway with rides, of course food and lots of entertainment.... including sheep racing!!

Notice how the jockeys are horses?

If the jockey fell off, the sheep was disqaulified.

Food prize at the finish line!

In addition to the sheep racing there was also pig racing:

And a dog herding ducks:

And all the finest wedding couture and farm equipment you could want:

"I want to look at wedding dresses!"   "But I want to look at the newest advances in cow-milking !"                       Problem solved.

Even though our past review of the 2010 New Plymouth Santa Claus Christmas Parade wasn't too favourable -

"We just made it home in time to eat dinner and get into the city for the Santa Claus parade. I had been hearing about it on the radio and saw it advertised. Apparently about 12000 people turned up last year. So I was kind of expecting something big. We got there about 5-10 minutes after the parade started and missed half of it. haha. It was over in less than 20 minutes."


Dustin was able to be coerced into attending this year! Luckily we have friends with 2 kids so that made a good excuse to hang out and attend the parade.

Everyone was excited for the short stack float. They also gave out frozen chocolate chip pancakes. Here pancakes are more of a sweet snack or dessert than a breakfast...

As we've observed in the past, the city comes alive through spring and into summer. There's tons of activities coming up so stay tuned!

Think of us on Dec 12th though, that's the next intake of expressions of interest for permanent residency! We submitted ours yesterday so this is the first step folks!