Friday night after the Blackhawks Convention I took Dan’s advice and went to Big Joe’s for my first ‘Turtle Race’.  If you’ve never been to Big Joe’s for turtle racing I highly recommend it.

Basically for every beer you buy you get 3 tickets, at 9pm (or when the turtles are ready) they begin the first of 6 raffles for turtle jockeys.  If you’re ticket is pulled you get assigned one of the six turtles.  Once all six turtles have jockeys ‘Igor’ puts all the turtles under a platter at the center of the ‘track’, the crowd counts down and then the platter is removed and the turtles go for it.  The first turtle to outside of the track wins and the last turtle or the ‘slowest fucking turtle in the world’ wins as well.  The first turtle’s jockey gets a tshirt, the slowest a free drink.

I never got to race because some one stole my winning ticket but Lauren had a winning turtle and did get a free tshirt.  I’m pretty sure Dan just made a ton of money on side bets.

*Side Note:  More Turtle Racing photographs here.