It’s time to celebrate cowboy Christmas

I'm trying to think of where to start. Personally speaking, I think getting in the truck and driving from one event to another is what riding bulls is all about. It's about seeing the country, meeting new people and winning a lot of money while you're doing it.

Flying from one place to the next and staying in one city all weekend is not rodeoing. It's definitely easy that way – maybe more convenient – but, to me, that's not what makes you a bull rider.

So, yeah, we left Texas on Thursday evening, drove all through the night and got to Richmond, Va., on Friday morning, went to sleep for a few hours, went to the bull riding and drove to Missouri and got there about noon, went to sleep for a couple hours, woke up and went to the bull riding, drove all night again and went to another bull riding last night.

Being on the road is all about drive, sleep, drive, sleep, drive. You're either driving by yourself while everybody else is asleep or one of your buddies is driving.

You put in a three-hour shift of driving and then you're crammed in a truck with three, four other guys so you're trying to get comfortable, you're fighting for elbow room, you're fighting for a place to lay your head. You put four guys in a truck together for that long and, well, sometimes it gets a little bit annoying, but it's all right.

As far as what events you pick when there's not a Built Ford Tough event is determined by where you want to go. Personally, I try to pick the two that have the most money or the two that are the closest together. If there's another one and it has more money at it then, shoot, drive a little further and enter it too.

It's fun.

I remember when I was 17 years old, and it was the first summer I got to compete and I left at the beginning of June – as soon as I was done with my last day of school – and I didn't come back home until midway through August a week before school started to buy my school supplies, and go back to school for my senior year.

Thinking about it – it's crazy. My mom wanted me to be home more in the summer and I wanted to be gone. It was the same last summer, and it's going to be the same way again this summer. You leave out and you don't come back home.

It's cowboy Christmas.

You can win so much money in such a short period of time and you have so much fun and see so many different places. You meet so many new people that it's such a good time.

You travel so many thousands of miles, you get bumped and bruised. It's during the summer that you become a cowboy – not just a bull rider, but a cowboy. You're driving somewhere just about every single night. You're not getting on a plane and flying somewhere and getting eight hours of sleep. You're riding in truck with three or four other guys where you can barely sleep, you show up at a bull riding and you might not have had a shower in three or four days. If you stop long enough just to take a shower and get a little bit of sleep you're too late for the next one.

You feel nasty, you're hurting all over and you get out of the truck and it's 100-and-some degree weather, and you have to go put your rope on two bulls. It's that cowboy mentality: either you like it or you hate it.

If you like it, you win a lot of money and you become famous. If you hate it, you go home with your tail tucked between your legs and nobody ever sees you or hears from you again.

And there was something that I was thinking about this weekend and it's going to make a lot of people unhappy, but I will go out on a limb and say: Guilherme and Valdiron are great bull riders – two of the best ever – but I don't think those Brazilians could handle being gone like that--the mentality it takes.

I don't think they could take it.

It would start to bother them about being away from home. It would bother them about not being able to work out everyday. I don't know if those guys could handle getting on that many bulls.

I've never seen them at very many Challenger events so I don't know if they could take it or not.

You could take the top Brazilians in the world and match them up against the top Americans and let them haul all summer long and I just think the Americans would win. It's the cowboy mentality and that's what it takes to do it.

Maybe they could, but I don't know because, like I said, I haven't ever seen them do it. You never see them at a Challenger event much less being gone for the whole summer.

Anyway, as soon as Dallas is over with, I load up in the truck and go to bull ridings during the week and the PBR events on the weekend. Then some the PBR events will start being during the week here in just a couple weeks, and I'll be going to those.

Everybody is going to be together and I actually think Luke Snyder is going to rent an RV and everybody is going to load up in it and we'll go up and down the road all summer long. I think that's the plan anyway.

There's no telling who all is going. You can't ever tell. One day there might be 20 guys packed in the RV and the rest there might only be three of us.

A hard summer will either make you or break you. You either come back with hundreds of thousands of dollars in your pocket or you could come back at the end of the summer with no money – beaten and bruised – and decide this bull riding stuff is not for you.