Waterloo & La Porte City

All Photos

Much like our decision to drive 8 hours to compete in Little Rock early in the year. The idea of competing in two contests in one weekend seemed like a good idea at the time. But left us thinking "what have we gotten ourselves into" as we packed the trailer between contests. I’m not sure how these two contests got started. But Waterloo has a chili contest Friday night and their BBQ contest on Saturday. Then La Porte City, which is 15 miles south, has their BBQ contest on Sunday. Mighty aggressive schedule for our little team.

The chili contest was a people’s choice contest. They had to buy a ballot from the city and were given a spoon and cup. Then they would visit each contestant and get a one ounce sample of chili. We would then check off our team name from their ballot. After they had sampled each chili they would place their ballot in team box who they felt was the best. 5 gallons of chili served one ounce at a time meant a lot of votes. It really was fun to talk to the guest and beg for their votes. In the end we won second place by 6 votes and received a ribbon and a check for $100.

With the chili contest over we turn our focus to the BBQ. Being upset with our past performance in pork and brisket we returned them to the Kingfisher. However the change did not help our scores any and we were skunked at the awards in all four categories.

After awards in Waterloo we packed everything up and drove the 15 miles to La Porte City. Since it is common for several teams to cook both of these contests. The organizers are very accommodating and arranged spots that were easy to get into that late in the day. We had much better results this time and received calls in Chicken, third place, and ribs winning tenth place. The 3rd place chicken also won us our first trophy!

I’m not sure if we will do both of these again or not. When it was all over it was a lot of fun. But we were having second thoughts being tired and hot and having to pack and unpack the smokers. But thanks to everyone’s help, thank you Dallas and Randy, we came through unscathed.

Next contest EL DORADO.