On Friday we decided that this would be a good weekend to go visit my Uncle Mike and go to Keeneland for the horse races. The rest of the family is going next weekend, but due to work schedules Jason and I couldn't make it then.
We left early Sunday morning and got to Lexington around 10:30am. We were at Keeneland by noon and Mike gave us a tour before the first race. He also taught us how to read the program and the information about the horses in each race. Then it came to place our first bets! Jason and I each decided that we'd spend $20 total for the day, so that first bet we each spent $4. Jason made back $3 of it, but sadly I choked. The rest of day sort of went like that and we were fairly discouraged. We tried picking our horses based on stats, on odds, on names, on look, and even by a weird alphabet rule. It seemed that the way we chose was always off by one race. We had a system for the way we did things - we always tried to see the horses as the jockeys mounted them and then we'd go place our bets, and then watch the race from either down right by the track, up in the stands, or somewhere else there on a tv.
The last race made our day! Earlier in the day we saw that race 9 had a horse called Panty Raid and we knew we wanted to bet on that one. We also knew that Lady Joanne was favored to win. We felt good about Panty Raid so we bet $6 for her to win, and also $4 for her to show (3rd place.) Then we bet $2 for Lady Joanne to place (2nd.)
You can see the race here:
Keeneland Race #9
If you watch the numbers at the bottom, Lady Joanne is 8 and Panty Raid is 2. You can see that for at least the first half Panty Raid is about halfway back. It was so excited as she came back and won! Lady Joanne came in 2nd - so we got both of our bets right! We ended up winning $35 on that bet - which made our entire day only a loss of $2. Not bad for a day of entertainment!
After Keeneland we went to the Kentucky Horse Park, where we got to see the statue of Secretariat and the plaque that Uncle Mike had done in my dad's name. Basically where it is located is exactly what Secretariat is looking down at.
This a statue of Man O' War - he's actually buried under it.
That brings me to a question - for those of you that read this (whoever you are!) would you rather I post the pictures on here, or is doing it in a link to Picasa ok? Sometimes if there are more than a few pictures it can be time consuming to post them all.
3 comments:
I like looking at all the pictures but you might want to put a couple on the blog for those who don't want to go somewhere else.
Hey Laura! I like to see the pictures on the blog if there are just a few. Otherwise, I totally don't mind clicking somewhere else. Hope all is going well with you!
I like to see a few pictures on the blog to go with the reading. Then if it looks interesting, I'll go to your other site! :)
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