Okay, okay so California Chrome didn’t take the Triple Crown and there was no history to be watched, but I still need to tell you how Belmont went!
Being a Triple Crown and all this year I made sure to make plans accordingly. 1.) Check with my friends for a head count on who was heading to the Stakes, check. 2.) Plan on getting to the train station earlier than precious years to avoid some of the chaos, check. 3.) Set up a said meeting spot once we arrived so that if we branched off we had a spot to meet back at, check check. I did everything I thought was beat practice to make the event day go smoothly, and for the most part it worked out. Definitely some bumps in the road, but not totally terrible.
As expected, transit was pretty atrocious. We waited quite a while before making it to the front of the line, had to split up from a few groups of friends, the train was late, and then the train went apx. 5 mph the whole trip. Once we made it though things ran pretty smoothly. It was definitely a lot more crowded than usual {which is still pretty crowded}, but it wasn’t unbearable. It was a beautiful day and we all had a lot of fun! I’m not big at betting, but I did bet on two horses for the day 1.) FiftyShadesofGold — I never read the 50 Shades of Grey books butttt I sure do love gold ;-) and then 2.) California Chrome. I ended up being a big loser for the day, but it was fun regardless.
Some other cool things that happened were there were performances by LL Cool J and Frank Sinatra, Jr. leading up to the Belmont race. Can you say awesome? I loved LL Cool J as a kid, so that was definitely a treat and hearing Frank Sinatra, Jr. sing New York, New York, was pretty awesome to say the least.
All and all I’d say it was a pretty solid day. Nice weather, great company, some yummy lemonade and kettle corn? Solid! Getting home was a 3 hour nightmare {NY Times did a decent write-up if you want to read}, but all and all a fun time! Definitely an event I recommend!
