Datenight at Keeneland

After a crazy, working-non-stop, couple of weeks Trent had some time off this weekend. Much deserved and much appreciated. We were able to go out on such a fun date on Saturday night. The plan was to soak up some of this fall weather (aka heaven!) and do some hiking at a nature preserve about a half hour away. Well, turns out if you go anywhere on a home football game day you can add an extra hour and a half to your drive time. Folks, if you wanna see some serious college sports fans, this is the place. Gee whiz. Anyway, long story short by the time we got to the point we could get out of town we were running out of daylight. Plan B had to go into effect. Trent knows that an easy way to please me is to take me to the horse country around here. I cannot help myself from getting giddy when I'm out there. I knew that the September Yearling Sales were happening at Keeneland so we decided to stop by and just do some wandering. Turns out they had a half hour left of sales for the day and they just let us waltz right in and watch. 

The last auction I've been to was the Utah County Livestock Auction. This was a whole different ballgame. I'm not sure what type of people we were rubbing shoulders with here. All I know is it was the kind of people who pay as much for a horse as the rest of us pay for things like houses (or much more!).

The first horse that sold when we walked in went for $160,000. Trent and I were really trying to see who was buying these horses. 

 In looking at the results from the first day of sales I noticed a horse sold for $1,650,000. 

 The room was pretty empty at this point. It was the very end of the day but these men in the suit coats would stand and call out as people would bid.  The man on the cell phone in the above picture is one of the bidders, always on the phone probably consulting with his boss? Trent and I were really worried we would be sorely under-dressed. Remember how we were dressed for hiking? To our relief there were lots of other people in jeans and it turned out we were just fine. I innocently went to the bathroom to find out there was an "attendant" in there with me who helped me dry my hands etc. and I was supposed to tip her. Oops...I spent all my dollars on some garage sale finds earlier that day. Hopefully she wasn't too put out with my lack of knowledge on bathroom tipping in these parts!

 And after the sales were over we went out to the race track and Trent got some pictures right before the sun went down. Can't wait to come watch the races next month.

Very fun, intriguing night and mostly just so nice to spend some time with my honey.