If you can imagine a perfect venue for barbeque, this would be it. Imagine about a 5 acre grove of tall oak trees creating a canopy of shade over beautiful green grass on a perfect 75 degree day. Sprinkle in 25 colorful and determined BBQ teams and you begin to get the picture of the Oregon Buckaroo State Championship.

This contest was put on by the Pacific Northwest Barbeque Association in conjunction with Molalla Educational Foundation, Buckaroo Rodeo and lots of support from the local business community. This is how successful contest do it. They always seem to have their community involved at every level and in the end raise a lot of money for a good cause.

Twelve hours-that is how long it took to drive to get to this contest. What a beautiful drive. I have not been in northern California and Oregon in many years. It is still as pristine as ever.

Friday night the contest had an Iron Chef competition for anyone who wanted to participate. The secret ingredient was "Lamb Ribs". A little different but that is what is suppose to happen in an Iron Chef competition. We ended up in 6th place out of 20 teams that participated. "Dang good", I thought. "In the money".

Being the new kids on the block, I wanted to have a good showing, besides we drove a long way and could use the gas money home. When they started announcing winners to the stage to collect their ribbons and cash, all I thought of was "O.K., we have enough to get to the border. O.K., enough to get home. O.K., this is enough to offset some of the cost of going to Oregon. I could see Kim getting nervous as they got down to the "overall categories". "Do you think we have a chance?", she asked. "I'm not sure", I said as it seemed some of the other teams had been up there quit a bit. "My heart is pounding and my hands are shaking", she said. "We shall see", I said. Then came the announcement of Grand Champion "and the winner of this years Oregon Buckaroo State Championship BBQ is QN4U!" WOW!ǵI can't believe it. Kim was her usual Quiet and demure self. Right! ǵ She let out a hoot and a holler and we danced our way up to the stage!!!!

We really enjoyed doing this contest, we made some new friends who we will meet up with again. The people in Oregon could not have been nicer and appreciated that we had come so far to participate in their event. It is always good to win but we had already decided that we would go back to do more contests up north and take some California teams with us.

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