Saturday, July 09, 2016

Anyone for Licquorice?

On day 2 we indulged ourselves with a day's racing. Yorkshire is one of the best places to go racing as there are so many racecourses to choose from. As our aim is to visit all the racecourses in the country we needed to go somewhere new, so there was only one choice - Pontefract.


We knew nothing about Pontefract apart from its association with the black sticky stuff, and didn't have high hopes of the racecourse, but boy were we in for a surprise. It is a lovely course set in parkland with a lake and it has a very pleasant olde worlde feel giving it bags of character. Of course, being there in such glorious weather added to its appeal.


So, the course was great, and the racing was very good. There were some beautiful horses and competitive racing. We'd read that Pontefract is a stiff track, both hilly and undulating, so horses, and jockeys, unused to its demands can struggle. We adopted a strategy of backing horses who had run there and done well previously. It worked, we were all slightly up on our betting at the end of the day. We also enjoyed seeing Frankie Dettori winning both of his 2 races and showing us just why he is one of the best.


We found an old set of scales for weighing out and in, in the ladies toilets
of all places ( please don't ask what we were doing in the ladies). Patrick went off the scale at 15 stone, so demonstrated that he has been drinking too much Guinness recently. His excuse was that he is on holiday.

Lots of love,

The B.U. Caravanners

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2 comments:

Fred's mum said...

Well you had better weather than Suffolk Branch did in Derbyshire! The horses would have needed their wellies the week we had - would they wear Hunter wellies (hee hee!).

Bears Unlimited Norfolk Branch said...

Very good Aunt M!