Got another American Royal BBQ in the books. \u00a0Wow those things are hard on an old man. \u00a0I’m feeling a bit beat up today, but considerably better than I was yesterday when I got home. \u00a0This was the first year I didn’t head down there on Thursday, which probably helped out a little bit. \u00a0Three nights sleeping on a cot is about three too many in my book. \u00a0Plus, I have a cold, haven’t been sleeping well, and myriad other excuses. \u00a0So, I rolled into the site Friday morning around 9:30 and soaked in my expected abuse for skipping out. \u00a0(Mostly dished out by guys who would leave that evening, never to be seen again for the remainder of the weekend. \u00a0Just pointing that out.) \u00a0Luckily they hadn’t done all the work on Thursday, there was still plenty left to do in preparation for the Friday night fiesta. \u00a0If you had a chance to go outside Friday, you may remember it as a rather crummy day. \u00a0Yeah, it was pretty chilly. \u00a0Despite the weather, we had an above-average turnout for the party, and everybody appeared to be having a good time. \u00a0On my several walk-abouts around the grounds, I definitely noticed we had one of the larger parties going on, and it lasted a lot longer than most. \u00a0Must have been our gregarious personalities, who knows. \u00a0Everyone declared it a success at any rate.<\/p>\n
A small handful of us spent the night down at the site, and woke up Saturday morning to a disaster of leftover food, dirty dishes, and a few hundred empty cups, cans, and bottles. \u00a0Mixed in with that trash were some mildly more interesting artifacts; \u00a0Roughly 50 discarded coozies, a hat or two, some stray single gloves, and a couple of tee shirts. \u00a0Hmmmm. \u00a0Whatever. \u00a0Given a total lack of alternative entertainment for the day, we spent most of it cleaning up that toxic wasteland. \u00a0I would say we need more trash cans for next year, but I don’t think it would do any good honestly. \u00a0The day passed quickly enough, and around 6:00 we started doing our prep-work for the BBQ competition. \u00a0Good thing somebody made that call in time, because it got very dark and very cold shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n
After a mostly sleepless night checking the smokers and trying to stay warm, we got up Sunday and rather lethargically plodded through the competition. \u00a0They started the Sunday turn-in thing three or four years ago, and I still have mixed feelings on it. \u00a0On one hand, there is really no way we could have done our prep work and got everything going in the middle of the party Friday night. \u00a0On the other hand, by the time Sunday finally comes around we are all so tired and disinterested that our main focus is just turning something in and getting the heck out of there. \u00a0Despite our\u00a0lackadaisical\u00a0effort, we did pretty fair in the results. \u00a0Surprisingly fair, as a matter of fact. \u00a0And, as usual, my predictions were remarkably skewed from the actual numbers. \u00a0Our best score was brisket, which I seriously expected to be at or near the bottom of the entire competition. \u00a0Go figure. \u00a0Next was the chicken, which despite a decent appearance really wasn’t very good. \u00a0Third-best were the ribs, which I was absolutely certain would be our best entry by far. \u00a0I could have eaten an entire slab of those things, they were awesome. \u00a0Last was the pork, an entry I was sure would do well just on appearance alone. \u00a0I will never figure out the results at those things. \u00a0It’s not just me either, all the guys that cook on the team had similar evaluations. \u00a0Especially\u00a0on the brisket; \u00a0It just wasn’t good. \u00a0Oh well, what can ya’ do. \u00a0I think we all had a good time and it’s not like we ever expect to win anyway. \u00a0We thoroughly defeated our arch-rivals Team Red Glove and that’s all that matters in our BBQ world. \u00a0I slapped a few pics<\/a> of the event up for those who missed it. \u00a0Note the omission of the brisket turn-in box. \u00a0I was so appalled I didn’t even take a picture of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Got another American Royal BBQ in the books. \u00a0Wow those things are hard on an old man. \u00a0I’m feeling a bit beat up today, but considerably better than I was yesterday when I got home. \u00a0This was the first year I didn’t head down there on Thursday, which probably helped out a little bit. \u00a0Three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1368,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions\/1368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}