Kentucky Derby and the Bourbon Trail

We finished our first academic year here and did something non-work-related to celebrate before starting up the summer term.  Living in Lafayette we're about two and a half hours to Cincinnati, where some of our friends from college live, and from there it is only a few hours more to areas of Kentucky containing the Kentucky Derby and the Bourbon Trail.  I suspect most readers can see how this could be the germ of an excellent weekend trip.

We drove to Cincinnati Friday night, hung out, and drove together to Louisville for the Derby on Saturday.  It was looking pretty wet outside and as we were only going for infield tickets (which are much cheaper but roofless) we stopped at a pretty decent barbeque restaurant a few miles from the Derby called Smoketown and ate a big lunch first.  Afterwards as it was still raining we went to downtown Louisville looking for a bourbon bar but being Derby day everything was closed so we headed out to stand in the mud and look at horses.

The parking situation was a little confused but we eventually figured it out and we probably only had to walk about fifteen minutes from where we parked, which is pretty good when you park for free and many tens of thousands of other people are going to the same place you are.  And let me tell you about those tens of thousands of other people: They. Were. Drunk.  While the stands and boxes at the Derby have a dress code (jackets and ties for men, seriously not optional) the infield is basically an enormous fraternity party except the drinks are using good bourbon instead of bad vodka.  As many of these people did dress up a little prior to joining this party, it was a lot like a better-dressed and more inebriated county fair.

It seems that most people with infield tickets are definitely not there for the horses, because 1) you can't hear the loudspeakers saying what is going on, 2) small screens showing the action are few and far between, and most importantly 3) the few people who were there for the racing brought tarps and fastened them to the fencing along the entire length of the infield to create tents, meaning that they blocked the view around the entire infield area except for a few sections of fence kept clear for emergency vehicle access.  If you want to actually see horse racing at the Kentucky Derby in person, I recommend you shell out the big bucks and wear your suit jacket to sit in the stands (or the boxes if you won the lottery).  Everyone else was there for the party and with the mint juleps being cheap, powerful, and good plenty of people were out of it enough to be calling it a day well before the 6:30 main event started.

My understanding is that the box seats over there start at over $1,000 go for up to $32,000 per person.  The stands are only hundreds of dollars each.  It was $66 for the two of us to get into the mud party.

Not above those mint juleps ourselves, either.

We worked our way towards the front of the people watching through the fence near an emergency access area, so we did in fact see about four seconds of the Derby, in person and for ourselves.  I believe we were in agreement that in the future we'd be OK to watch from a bar instead of standing in a field, but for a one-time experience it was fine and we were much drier and better prepared than most people who hadn't checked the weather.

 This is the best view of the racetrack we got.  I'm not sure why they didn't put some stands in the infield or at least stop people with tarps from blocking the view, but it was all standing all the time.

 This is a screen showing the action that is visible from the infield, and it is not very large - this is on maximum zoom with the camera.

 This screen also fuzzed into unintelligibility shortly before the Derby actually started, but they did fix it before the race began.

 Horses go by for a few seconds - yay!

Once the Derby was in the books we headed back to Cincinnati and ate terrific Indian food for dinner.  The next day was looking just as wet or wetter, but the rain matters a lot less when you're inside touring distilleries.  The next entry will be on the Bourbon Trail, of which we did a portion the following day.