Del Mar Races

The Del Mar racetrack is about a half an hour or so from Oceanside, and I've always thought it sounded fun to go to the races.  I got half-price tickets through Living Social, as did my friend Deb Moffat.  Sadly, we couldn't find a day that we could all go together, so Jim, Dolly and I went alone yesterday.  We saw three of the races before Dolly started to lose it from nap-deprivation.  It was fun, especially once we started reading about the horses and their chances of winning and picking ones to root for.  We decided it would be more fun if we could sit down close where you can hear the horses go by and if we had money riding on it.  The whole gambling thing seems (not only evil but) super-complicated, though, and if we'd bet on the horses we were rooting for, we would've lost.

Dolly got to practice one of her new tricks, clapping:

(The other trick she's learned of late is waving.  Sometimes she combines the two - a couple of claps, a brief wave, a couple of claps, some waving, etc.  We're still trying to teach her the finer points about when each action is appropriate.)

We think she's going to be a dentist, as she does this a lot:

The starting gates were placed on our side of the track for one of the races we saw.  Binoculars would've been helpful.

Reading up:

Sick attempt at a family photo, at the insistence of a (drunk?) girl sitting in front of us who thought we were cute:

The infamous tongue:

Note the hat in the background.  Not many hats there, but some.

On our way out, we stumbled upon this place where the horses are walked around before they race, and people look and evaluate and decide which horses to bet on.  Jim tried to get Everest interested in the horses, to no avail.

Dean got a short nap in the car, and then we stopped at Las Olas in Carlsbad for a quick dinner before heading home.  Miss Chavez was totally hyperactive.  The waiter commented, "She's a grabber, huh?"  Then, "She's a handful, huh?"  The food wasn't great, either, but it was nice to be out together. 

We had to stop by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things.  Tired Dolly insisted on lounging sideways in the cart the whole time.