Leg 4 Trust But Verify
When I started to put this leg together, I thought it would be the first, what could be better than trading a few New England winter days with one's in Florida. I knew Tampa Bay, Gulfstream and Pompano were running, just needed to confirm Hialeah. That's when things started to go south (bad pun), it seems Hialeah decided to run their twenty days of live racing in June, not January as they had done since they re-opened. A recheck of the schedule was in order.
Enough Said !A quick check of racing dates and I can't believe my luck, Pompano closes May 31, Hialeah opens the same day, Gulfstream and Tampa race until late June. It won't be January, but all the Florida tracks can still be hit in one visit. Here's where the verify part comes in, technically there is racing at Tampa Bay on June 30, but the season actually ended May seventh, so much for plan ahead! The good news, one less day in steamy hot Florida.
As I'm getting ready to finalize my now amended schedule, it seemed odd that Hialeah was not showing up on any simulcast calendars, so I decided to dig a little deeper. Well it seems, at least in Florida that you can have fake racing. To run your casino you just have to say your going to have racing and pay some person to move a horse from their barn to the track for a visit. After that no live racing required, thank you very much! After taking all that in, it was a no brainer to cancel the whole leg and regroup next year.