Saturday at Arlington Park is the Arlington Million Stakes, Beverly D, and a third Grade 1 turf race. This is horse racing at it's best.

How long does it take to get from Ohare to/from the racecourse by rail? I did it once 10 or 12 years ago: El train in towards the city and then commuter rail out to Arlington Heights? How frequent are the trains?

I am hoping that I could leave AP at about 6:30PM and make it to ORD by 8PM for a 9PM flight (I will have my boarding pass and no bags to check). This is doable, isn't it?

Rent a car and save the hassle of taking the El to one place and picking up the old Chgo NWern train. It's a straight shot out the tollroad.

Otherwise, both the El and RTA have great websites for schedules.

The RTA has a good trip planner site that helps find the best route:

http://www.transitchicago.com/maps/tripplanner.html

I plugged in O'Hare and Arlington Park, and it gave me a bus route to the Des Plaines Metra station (using one of the Metra stations near O'Hare seems like it would be a lot faster than going into the city on the El).

Also, here's the schedule for the Metra Union Pacific Northwest line.

http://metrarail.com/Sched/cnw_nw/cnw_nw.shtml#STATION

In general, they run about once an hour on Saturdays, but there appears to be a big gap on Saturday afternoons -- an inbound train at 5:28, then the next one at 8:28.

Thanks for the info. I was disappointed to see that the schedule wouldn't work out on the return to ORD after the races. So, I did make a car rental reservation.

The good news is that I got a low airfare for the trip. The bad news is that the departure from D.C. is at 6AM. Seemed like a good idea last night.

I searched hotels using SideStep and came up with the Radisson in Schaumburg and saw that it had a free airport shuttle and is two and a half miles from the racetrack. I can catch their shuttle and make it to the hotel by 8AM, get a few hours of sleep, then get the shuttle (or taxi) to the racetrack. I made a reservation for a half-day stay for $40. The guy said that I could call the hotel from the track and if the shuttle was available that they would come get me and take me to the airport. This seems like a good idea tonight.

Let us know how you end up w/this quick trip for the horses. Didn't you just get back from the Phoneix/Sedona trip? How did that go? Baseball, red rocks, Oak Creek Canyon, and then horse racing. Must have been an interesting few weeks.

After I arrived yesterday morning, I went to the Red Carpet Club at ORD to have breakfast and to decide what to do: rail + taxi, rental car, or hotel shuttle. I made it all the way to the shuttle bus stops across from the Hilton and still had not made up my mind. Finally decided on the rental car. This was the right decision, I think. It was a nice car and an easy drive.

I drove right towards the track and saw a building called Trackside. Looked like people were going in/out to do early bird wagering. It is outside of the track area, on the backside, right at the half-mile pole. Talked to some guys there for awhile and learned there was a shuttle from there to the main entrance to the track. I drove down the street to the Ramada for the breakfast buffet and then came back and parked at trackside. Saw that there were two long line of cars waiting to get into the track's parking lot (this was at about 9:45). It was definitely better to park at Trackside.

Got a box seat with a great view of the track. It was worth the $42 (in addition to the $8 general admission). Arlington Park is really a great track and they handled the day very well. It may have been better than the Hong Kong Jockey Club's international festival last year. It was first-rate, AP gets for Arlingon Million day.

Got to see some magnificent racehorses racing in ideal conditions. Temperatures were upper 60s, low 70s, I think. At the beginning it was mostly puffy clouds with some sun. The clouds gradually gave way to mostly sunny. The free ball-cap came in handy.

This was the "International Festival of Racing" at Arlington and it was world class racing. The Beverly D. Stakes was won by the Italian jockey Lanfranco (Frankie) Dettori (he is the top jockey in Paris, rides also in England, and speaks English with a UK accent). He rode a South African bred mare, Crimson Palace, owned by Sheik Mohammed from Dubai.

They kept to the scheduled post times pretty well so I was able to see all 12 races before heading back to the airport. Had a little bit of a hassle getting back to the airport, but it worked. United Airlines did a good job both ways.