Geocaching for Horse Races and Seinfeld - Sorta

by Erik Lane 30. November 2004 03:56

This weekend was a good of family time for Thanksgiving and Geocaching!  We cached on both Saturday and Sunday and it was, again, lots of fun.  We placed three new caches in our "Seinfeld" cache series...."Take the Pen", "Adjacent to Refuse", and "Low Flow?".  We even found another neat piece of history that we would've missed if it wasn't for Geocaching and I loved it! 

There is a multi-cache called "Arlington Downs" that takes you to what was once the location Texas' first parimutual racetrack.  It was 1.0625 horse track from 1929-1937 that had a grandstand that seated 6,000 (a portion of it is now at the G. Rollie White Downs track in Brady, TX).  The most famous race run at Arlington was the Texas Derby, described as a tryout for the Kentucky Derby.  It closed in 1937 when parimutual betting was outlawed in Texas and after that the track was used for a lot of different things such as auto racing and was used during the filming of the movie "To Please a Lady".  The track was finally sold in 1956 and has since been demolished long ago.  The area is now a business park not too far from The Ballpark in Arlington and all that is left is an old watering trough and with its little horses and riders along the outside are the only clue that it was part of the track.  The trough is about 0.2 miles away from the Historical marker describing the track.


This picture is from Roadside America This picture is from the J.W Dunlop Photo Collection at UTA
WaterTrough GrandStand

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Categories: Geocaching

Comments

The Wife
The Wife United States on 11/30/2004 9:59:00 AM

It was fun wasn't it!  Enjoyed hanging out with you during your "time off".

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