And they're off: Horsing around at Louisville, Kentucky's Churchill Downs

We happened to visit on Mother's Day.
Nothing says "I love you Mom" like a $2 bet on Glow Worm in the fifth.

Our horse came in last.

You can't visit Churchill Downs without having a Mint Julep
(unless you don't drink or you don't like Mint Juleps).

This is the Winner's Circle, where the horses get that big bunch of roses put around their necks on Kentucky Derby day. This picture also reminds me of a gag from The Benny Hill Show.

"Hello, Central Casting? Send up a guy who looks likes
he spends a lot of time at the race track."

Here's a picture of me and a guy with a big rear end.
(That's me on the left.)

These seats go for $500 on Kentucky Derby day.
They were $2 when we were there.

They really do play that little horseracing fanfare tune
before each race.

People in Kentucky take their horses seriously. After all, they've got the most famous horse event in the world. And as far as big sporting tournaments go, the Kentucky Derby is one of the more eccentric. Run since 1875, it's the oldest continuing sporting event in the USA, and it's been at Louisville, Kentucky's Churchill Downs race track since 1937. Unlike the Super Bowl or the World Series, spectators in the stands wear extremely nice clothes. Women's hats alone are a sport unto themselves, with their own parade that follows the race. And what's the official drink of March Madness? Gatorade? Please. The Kentucky Derby has the genteel Mint Julep, a harsh-until-you've-had-a-few libation of mint, Kentucky bourbon, sugar and water. The race only lasts a couple minutes, "the most exciting two minutes in sports" as it's known, so the event is all about anticipation. TV reporters spew forth facts and figures and heart-tugging stories about plucky horses and their come from behind owners and jockeys for hours before the race, only to have some horse they completely ignored steal the show.

We visited Churchill Downs on a beautiful May Sunday, which also happened to be Mother's Day. Maybe because of that there were a lot of nicely dressed families in attendance. We took a great guided tour which got us right up to the track which was sandier and muddier than expected, reminding me of the Seinfeld horseracing episode with the line "His father was a mudder. His mother was a mudder."

It's nice to see all the racetrack cliches come to life before your eyes. A portly but nattily attired trumpeter plays that familiar horse racing fanfare before each race. He waits in his own special little house until just the right time, comes out, plays the tune, and then goes back inside until the next race. I like that.

We couldn't leave without placing a bet, so we decided to put $2 on the horse with the longest odds. The guy at the betting window said number 4, no wait, number 2, so number 2, Aggressive Adventurer, it was. Let's just say we won't be retiring from our gambling winnings. Aggressive Adventurer came in last. Number 4 won, though. The weed of gambling bears bitter fruit.

Ass good ass it gets: A gallery of horse's patoots from the Kentucky Horse Park

Lexington, Kentucky likes to bill itself as the "Horse Capital of the World" and with good reason, for the Kentucky Horse Park is located here. It's been a working horse farm and an educational theme park since 1978 with museums, lovely grounds, and a daily parade of former champion horses including Cigar and Funny Cide who now call this bucolic place home. It's a beautiful, serene place and even if you're only mildly interested in our equine friends, you can have a nice time here. But what about the eccentric roadside attractions fan? Pretty white fences and thick Kentucky Bluegrass will only take you so far. I've got it...horses' rumps. Derisively calling someone a horse's ass has long been a mainstay in our culture and they've literally got a ton of them here (and by that I mean the animals, not the staff, who are very nice indeed). Why did that term became synonymous with "stupid person" though? The Urban Dictionary puts it this way:

Someone who is not just an ass, but a big ass, indeed, a horse's ass. Someone who really makes an ass of themselves.

And let's face it, we all make horse's asses out of ourselves every once in a while, so why not embrace it? As President John F. Kennedy would say, "Ass not what your country can do for you. Ass what you can do for your country."

Walking in a wiener wonderland: Springfield, Illinois' Cozy Dog Drive-In

Springfield, Illinois has a lot to offer the eccentric roadside attraction fan, not the least of which is a glorious stretch of Route 66 that runs through town. A must-stop, especially around lunchtime, is the Cozy Dog Drive-In, birthplace of the hot dog on a stick. The story goes something like this: While patronizing a Muskogee, Oklahoma eatery in the 1940s, Ed Waldmire Jr. was enjoying the hot dog baked in cornbread he was eating and wanted to come up with a way to modernize it. His friend Don Strand developed a mix that would stick on a wiener while being french-fried. Ed put the battered dogs on cocktail forks and deep fried them with spectacular results, which led to their official launch in 1946. Originally called crusty curs, the more pleasing moniker cozy dogs was developed with Ed's wife's prodding. In 1949, the Cozy Dog Drive In was born, built on Route 66 at South Sixth Street. In 1996, Cozy Dog moved to its current location, where Ed's daughter-in-law and grandsons continue on with the business right next door to the original location.

They've got great Route 66 decor inside with their funky hot-dog-boyfriend-and-girlfriend logo and signage. They've also got the standard road food fare like bacon and eggs, cheeseburgers and ice cream. But how can an out of towner not get a Cozy Dog while in the presence of such greatness? I ordered one with a side of fries and, truth be told, it was the best deep fried battered weenie on a stick I ever ate. Frankly, we relished every moment we were at the Cozy Dog Drive In until we mustard up the energy to leave and ketchup on the rest of our journey. Bun voyage!

Lost for words: Greetings from Scrabbletown, Rhode Island

If you're in the right frame of mind, you can't help but see eccentric roadside attractions everywhere you go. This was the case for me and a site just a few miles from our house. There's a road in North Kingstown, Rhode Island I always thought was humorously peculiar: Scrabbletown Road. What a name. Kind of hard to put on airs when your castle is on a street that makes you think of either extremely hard times or a place where the word "jezebel" earns you 75 points.

There really was a village called Scrabbletown back in the early 1800s. Here's some highlights of what historian G. Timothy Cranston has to say about it in a piece "The View from Swamptown":

The story goes that sometime in the early 1800's "Old Man Mawney", one of the elder statesmen of the area, upon realizing that the little cluster of homes centered around a grist mill on a tributary of the Hunt's River was significant enough to warrant a name, decided, after consulting with a jug of rum, that "Scrabbletown" was just about perfect as all the people living there had to scrabble to make a living. His ruminations were obviously held in high esteem as the name stuck and is still used to this day.

(A grist mill was built in the 1820s and Scrabbletown was a mill village until the mill ceased to operate around the early 1900s.)

As is usually the case with a small village such as this, the end of the mill meant the end of the village, and with the closing of the Scrabbletown schoolhouse around 1920, the village, which at its peak consisted of a school, a tavern, a Baptist meetinghouse, the gristmill, and twelve to fifteen houses and farms, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.

Scrabbletown was largely forgotten and stayed out of the limelight for some fifty years, until 1976 when it was nominated as an archetype for the area's rural past to the National Register of Historic Places.

There's a very nice new office park on Scrabbletown Road and instead of using a corporately bland name like North Kingstown Commons or Pinnacle Point Estates, they went with the proudly earthy Scrabbletown Professional Center. Kudos for sticking to your roots, Scrabbletown businesses. I would gladly patronize anyone who calls Scrabbletown home.

Greetings from Lincoln Lincoln Bo Bincoln Banana Fana Fo Fincoln Fe Fi Mo Mincoln, Lincoln, Illinois

The world's largest covered wagon, although it appears to be more of a convertible here.

The Tropics appeared to have gone out of business when we were in Lincoln. It wasn't for lack of an extra cool sign, though.

The Lord will provide.

You can't have a town named Lincoln in the state of Illinois without a big tribute to Old Abe and Lincoln, Illinois has lulu. It's the world's largest covered wagon, driven by the railsplitter himself. I don't recall if Lincoln ever actually travelling by covered wagon from my high school history classes but what-the-hey, this is pretty awesome. It's also on Route 66 (on the corner of Woodlawn Road), which is nothing but cool, too. We got there early on a foggy morning after spending the night at the Super 8 across the street. Abe is lovingly rendered in a grotesque folk art motif and sits on a prominent plot next door to a lawn mower dealership. The site weighs five tons, is 40 feet long, 12 feet wide and 24 feet tall and is in the Guinness Book of World Records. Abe is seen reading a law book, which seems appropriate since he practiced law in this very town. He was obviously ahead of his time in the reading-while-driving department, too. In the same neighborhood were some pretty cool signs too. Overall, this is a great eccentric roadside attraction, but know what would have been even cooler? A giant Abe Lincoln driving a giant Lincoln Continental. That would be Abe-ove and beyond, but nobody asked me.

Lactose Intolerant: Rhode Island's Abandoned Milk Can Building

The thriving Rustic Drive-In is across the street.

And just down the road is Coffee & Cream, home of the giant travel mug.

The Milk Can's story is a well-intentioned but sad one. The building dates back to 1929 and is a prime example of that era's buildings-shaped-like-things roadside architecture. It went out of business in 1968 and sat vacant until the state wanted to use the land it was on for a highway exit ramp in the 1980s. Stanley Surtel Jr. and his father-in-law Frank D'Andrea bought the structure for $1,100 and had it moved from its original Lincoln, Rhode Island location to a new spot a mile down the road on Route 146 in North Smithfield. Almost immediately, the new owners encountered problems. It took preservationists and highway officials 17 months to devise a way to move the building without damaging it. Then regulations for installing a septic system added another delay. Surtel and D'Andrea put $50,000 into restoration when the state informed them the ground water on the new location was horribly contaminated with 600 times the allowable amount of benzine. Never reopened, the structure has been sitting on that same plot since 1991.

As much as I love beautifully restored or original old places, abandoned ones have a special eccentric quality all their own. Poignant, sad, ironic, spooky, or just plain weird... it's all good.

The Milk Can is on a particularly fertile stretch of Route 146. The spectacular Rustic Drive-In is across the street and is the rarest of rare roadside attractions: a thriving drive-in movie theater showing first-run fare like the new Harry Potter movie and selling out. And just down the road, a newer structure, the Coffee and Cream, is a recent establishment with the feel of an old time place but with a contemporary spin: a giant travel mug out front. But the Milk Can is the cream of the crop in this trifecta of retro Rhody road sites. It's an udder delight.