The Slower Road

… Or should I say, “basketball, basketball, basketball”?

Last summer and fall, in the lead-up to the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, I offered occasional posts about things going on here in Lexington; these were usually related to horses, the WEG, local food & restaurants, or basketball. (You might think that about all we do here in Lexington is eat good food, watch horses, and watch basketball. You might be right.)

If you’ve missed these sorts of posts, today’s should help fill the void.

In order to keep up with the challenge of posting something here every day, I try to prepare weekend posts during the week and schedule them to go up on Saturday and Sunday. I didn’t quite make it that far this week, and so I’m writing this on Saturday.

Because I don’t have Internet access at home, I’m sitting in a lovely corner of the delightful Cuppa: A Tea Café on Jefferson Street. They have sandwiches, homemade scones, coffee drinks, and a huge array of black, green, and white teas. You can drink your tea by the mug, or by the (small or large) pot. If you go the teapot route, you even get to pick out your own teacup and saucer from the china cabinets in each room.

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I don't have any photos of my food today, but this is the corner of Cuppa that I'm looking at as I drink my green earl grey tea

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Outside the window is a fairly steady stream of basketball fans, walking to and fro. I can’t tell, of course, where each group is headed, but there are several options: the state high school basketball championship games are all day and into the night at Rupp Arena (just down the street), and there’s a great pizza joint down the street in the other direction — and a pub across the street from that — with TVs that I’m sure are showing the UK game. As I write this, the Kentucky Wildcats are playing a close game against West Virginia in the second round of the NCAA Championships. Go Cats!!

Having now caught you up briefly on two of our three main interests here in Lexington, we’ll head back to the third on Monday: horses, of course.

We hadn’t had much rain here lately in Lexington. Cold weather, yes. And snow. And recently, a couple of gloriously warm days that felt like spring. But not much rain.

Then, yesterday morning, it started raining … and it continued to rain all day. Yesterday evening, the severe storms and heavy downpours blew through. After all was said and done, we ended up with more than two inches of rain.

On my way into work this morning, I took some pictures here at the Kentucky Horse Park:

this creek (with quite a current going this morning) is usually at most a trickle ... or dry

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... another view of the same, a little farther downstream

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... and a little farther downstream again, with the Alltech Arena in the distance

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this is spot where the creek, when it's full, seems to settle and spread into a bit of a lake

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... and another view of the same "lake" ... these are normally paddocks, of course

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... and the very full creek, winding its way off into the distance