The South Carolina residents had been on the road a lot this spring, attending the Kentucky Derby in Louisville and the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore two weeks later. In late May, they went on a cruise to Cuba with their extended family to celebrate McEntire’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.

During the cruise, they reinforced their plan to skip the Belmont. They had had to board their dogs too often, they were tired from traveling. They were definitely not going to the Belmont.

They returned from the cruise on Friday, June 1 in a kind of happy exhaustion from celebration and travel.

“We were sitting at home, exhausted, and I said, ‘Hey, babe, I know we said we weren’t going to go to the Belmont.

“But let’s pretend for a minute that I could win an entry to the Belmont Stakes Challenge….”

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