Arrived in Lexington just late enough to miss the last race; as I entered Keeneland, hordes were exiting, but still, it was rather nice to witness the place in quiet, golden, late afternoon/early evening sunshine…

Drove today from just north of Baltimore to Lexington, with an extended, simultaneously frustrating and gratifying pit stop at Charles Town. More on that upcoming…I learned, though, that being the guest of a trainer does not guarantee access to the barn area. Who knew?

Gorgeous foliage in the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia…

One of the benefits of a road trip is the opportunity to catch up with podcasts, and I listened to the September 13th edition of NPR’s Only A Game. One of the stories focused on the influx of slots money into harness racing, focusing on Saratoga Raceway and upstate New York owners and drivers. If you follow such things, you might not learn anything new from listening to it, but it was a great listen, if at times a dispiriting one:

The places that have [slots] are really hoping that horse racing withers and dies, because that just gets in the way and takes up a lot real estate and is a much slower way to lose your money…

I heard similar sentiments echoed this morning on Charles Town’s backside.

Not far from the West Virginia border, my radio caught the opening bars of Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a song on the soundtrack of far too many of my teenage nights, and that I likely haven’t heard since then. Without a scintilla of effort, my brain retrieved, perfectly, every lyric; what vital information, I wonder, has my memory surrendered so that I could sing along, at the top of my lungs, through the Allegheny Mountains?

On the agenda for Friday: breeding farms and racing. Yippee!

Before I left, I wrote a piece on racing fans that is now up on The Blood-Horse. Do stop by and have a look…