The Preakness

Well I was out in Baltimore this weekend for the Preakness. I am not a big horse race fan, so I wasn't sure what kind of experience it would be. In my mind, I thought, horse racing...that is sort of a snooty upper class sport. Wrong!!! I had to work on Friday because there was testing on my bridge. So I had to change my flight and leave Saturday morning. My Friday night was mellow, and I had to wake up early Saturday. I don't know what I was thinking, I was up at 5:00 a.m. in Appleton for a 7:30 a.m. flight out of Milwaukee. I got the airport at 7:05 a.m. and once I made it through security I heard my name was being paged over the intercom. It was a dead sprint to my gate. I was the last one on the plane and they closed door right after I got on. I got into Baltimore without any more problems and met up with the rest of my group, Joe, Gibby, Hedges, Shooter, Ebs and Kelly, at the hotel. The Preakness is different from any other major sporting event I have ever been to. They allow carry-ins. We came a bit unprepared and instead of bringing in coolers, we took hotel garbage cans full of beer and ice. The area around the race track is an absolute dump. Their were kids everywhere with shopping carts that would cart your beer for you to the entrance. We had seats on the infield in the bleachers right on the four turn. Here you can see one of the earlier races on the grass track. The main race was out on the dirt track. Great seats, Gibby came through big.
Our group was hanging out a good part of the day at the top of the bleachers looking out at the mass of people on the infield.
Here are Hedges and Shooter by our sections private bathrooms.
Now here is what I found so absolutely alarming. The infield was crazy. Like I said, I thought going to this race was going to be something of snob fest. Not true. Since you can carry in whatever you want, there was beer everywhere. In fact probably too much beer. It seemed to be all college kids in the infield by they are all idiots. As you can see from this video. These morons were throwing full beer cans into the crowd. I just couldn't believe that people could act that way.

I would call this ground zero. This was still early in the day, maybe 2 in the afternoon. Just trash everywhere. By the late afternoon I think the kids started running out of beer or just got sick of throwing beer cans. I went out in to the infield kind of early to see what it was all about. I found a pretty good viewing spot, and stood on someone's beer cooler and just watched beer cans filling the air. You could just track cans and watch them hit people. It was just so unreal to see people would act that way.Here is Hedges with a guy we ran into that got hit in the head with a beer can. Hedges is demonstrating exactly where this guy got hit.We made our way back to our seats for the race. This is a girl that I met in the bleachers who actually beat me in a beer slamming contest.This is the loading of the horse for the big race.Here is what your view would be if you were a horse at the starting gate.After the race, we headed to Camden Yards for the baseball game. We managed to get 6 of us in a cab. 5 grown men in the backseat of a cab. I don't know how that is even possible, but it happened. This is Shooter and Hedges playing the Brett Favre game. Here are our seats in the bleachers.The night ended up at the original ESPNZone. Hedges fell asleep in one of the recliners. Somehow, I ended up getting thrown out of there for whatever reason. I still don't know what I did wrong.