Totally Texas -- Catch you at the rodeo, pardner

Fort Worth Stock Show & rodeo

Will Rogers Memorial Center

3401 West Lancaster Avenue, Fort Worth

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With highs in the 60’s and plenty of sunshine, the weather looks great for Saturday’s all-horse parade, the official opening of this year’s Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo. The parade starts at the Tarrant County Courthouse and wends through downtown Cowtown beginning at 11 a.m. There’s reserved seating available for a price, but with hundreds of horse- and mule-drawn wagons, riders, and marching bands traveling a nearly twenty-block route, there‘s room along the way for plenty of non-paying sightseers.

Except for the midway, most of the stock show’s events are under cover at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, so visitors can keep their boots dry even if the weather turns bad before the stock show’s close February 8.

Admission to the stock show is $10 for adults, $5 for children age 6-16, free for kids age 5 and under. Separate rodeo tickets are $19 for weekday matinees, $25 for weekend evening performances and specialty rodeos--Best of the West Invitational, Bulls’ Night Out and the Super Shootout. Rodeo tickets are also good for general admission to the grounds on the day of the performance.

Or get admission to the stock show free with memberships from the Fort Worth Museum of Science and Nature, National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, or The Cattle Raisers Museum. The museums reciprocate with free admission to their exhibits for holders of a stock show ticket. For ticket information and complete schedule of events, see www.fwssr.com/.

There’s parking near both the parade route and the Will Rogers Memorial Center. Or you can arrive the way people did for the first stock show in 1896--by rail. Or at least by a combination of rail and bus. Tickets for the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) between Dallas and Fort Worth area also good for free bus rides between the TRE terminus and the coliseum. TRE runs daily except Sundays, and will operate a regular weekday schedule on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 20. From the terminus, it’s about a 15-minute trip by bus to the memorial center. For fares and schedules, see
www.trinityrailwayexpress.org/.

The T’s shuttle buses also operate weekends during the stock show, picking up passengers for $1 each way from Ridgmar Mall and Billy Bob’s North Lot at the Fort Worth Stockyards. See www.the-t.com/.

And speaking of stockyards, visitors can still catch the twice-daily cattle drive of Fort Worth’s official herd of longhorns during the stock show. For best times to hang your with longhorns, see
www.stockyardsstation.com/.