Norm (The McCook Chef) and I spent a pretty fascinating twenty-four hours in Denver on Memorial Day. We left here at seven in the morning in the T-Bird and arrived downtown at 10 Mountain time.

We parked the car in a parking garage and walked down to the Delectable Egg, maybe the best breakfast place in town. It was full as it always is and we had to wait 15 minutes or so to get a table. Every town I've eaten breakfast in offers the classic Denver omelet but the Delectable Egg doesn't.

It has a Colorado omelet that's exactly the same thing as the Denver omelet. I have no idea why they call it the Colorado omelet instead of the Denver omelet but that's what I had and it was unbelievably good.

While we were eating, a young couple in their early 20s walked in and were seated a couple of tables in front of us. The female half of the couple might have been the second most attractive woman I've ever seen. She had on a little St. Louis Cardinals jersey and white short-shorts and it was pretty comical to see the men who were there with their wives trying to look without looking, if you know what I mean.

Shortly after the couple had been seated, five blind guys with long white walking canes came in and were seated at one of the front tables. I watched them to see if the restaurant had braille menus but evidently they didn't. A waiter stood at their table for several minutes reading the entire breakfast menu to them. The couple I mentioned earlier finished eating just before we did and, as they left, this girl was so attractive that even the five blind guys turned around and looked at her as she walked by.

 

We left the restaurant and headed toward the LoDo Sports Bar, which is just a couple of blocks from Coors Field. Every bar in the vicinity of the ball park has a roof-top deck that is very popular on nice days and this was a perfect day in Denver. In fact, they're so popular that the roof-top was full at the place we stopped at so we opted to sit at the bar downstairs.

We had a few cocktails while we watched the Duke-Johns Hopkins University lacrosse national championship game and the Cincinnati Reds baseball game.  We left the bar just in time to get to the stadium by gametime. I had ordered our tickets over the Internet and requested the best seating available and boy, did we get it.

If any of you are looking for great seats the next time you go to a Rockies game, Section 218 is the place to be. The only entrance to this section is through glass doors. Behind the seats are a full service bar, a gourmet coffee shop, and a carved roast beef station, as well as a full-service restaurant and a beautiful terrace for the smokers in the crowd.

We stopped at the bar on the way to our seats and I was going to buy the first round. Norm wanted a beer and I wanted a vodka tonic. When I gave the very polite and cordial bartender our order, he asked if I wanted a single or a double vodka tonic. I never, ever drink doubles. I don't think I've ever ordered a double in my life but this time I did.

What the heck, it's an afternoon major league baseball game in a beautiful city on a beautiful day and I don't have to go back to work til August. The tab for a double vodka tonic and a beer was $18. Yep, eighteen bucks. Six dollars per shot and six dollars for the beer. You can buy two QUARTS of Barton's vodka at Wal-Mart in McCook for $18.

But we weren't at Wal-Mart in McCook, we were at Coors Field in Denver so I paid the tab and we went to our seats. In this section, there are only 20 rows and our seats were about halfway down. There was no one sitting on either side of us and we were located between first base and right field on the second level. I've heard there are no bad seats in Coors Field and I'm pretty sure that's right. I've sat all over the ball park, even out in the Rock Pile, and I've never had a bad seat but these were by far the BEST seats I had ever had. They even had waiters and waitresses that would come to your seats, take your orders and bring them back to you. Norm and I both like to walk around a lot so we opted to serve ourselves.

The next round belonged to Norm and he left to get our drinks. A few minutes later he came back and said that the line to the bar was a block long while the gourmet coffee shop located just next door to the bar had three employees looking at each other because they had no customers at all. So he asked me what I wanted in my Cappuccino and I told him lots of vodka. He went back and waited in line at the bar. I've been a Cardinals fan almost my entire life and Norm, having lived in Denver before, is a Rockies fan. The Rockies won so Norm was happy and I wasn't.

 

We left the ballpark and walked over to retrieve our car at the parking garage. The charge for parking was ten dollars due to event parking every time the Rockies play a home game. You pay the 10 bucks when you leave. Now even though this was a day game on a holiday that resulted in the third largest crowd of the season, there was no one there to take our money when we got ready to leave.

People were trying to stick 10 dollar bills into slots, swipe credit cards and everything else you can think of just to get out of there and most of them weren't having any luck so the line to get out was long. One guy even called someone on a phone that was next to the pay slot before he was able to get out. When it was finally our turn, I put a 10 dollar bill in the slot, the change machine, for whatever reason, gave me five one dollar coins back, the gate lifted up, and we got the heck out of there before the gate could change its mind and trap us in the parking garage; perhaps forever.

 

This is only half of our day but I'm out of room. I'll tell the rest of the story next week which will include dinner at the Lone Star Steakhouse and an exchange we had with our waitress who happened to go to the same Bible College in Colorado that Norm did and also the concert we attended at Red Rocks which, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the weirdest concert I've ever been to in my life.

 

P.S. This past Thursday, Bill Larson and I met at Heritage for a round of golf. It looked like a storm was moving in but we decided to get in as many holes as possible. Lightning became so prevalent that we only played two holes before we headed for cover, even before it started raining.

I'm not a big fan of lightning when I'm out in the open, especially on a golf course. We took shelter under the overhang of the bathroom located behind the tee box on the fifth hole. Minutes later, we were joined by ten other guys in five golf carts as the rain started to fall. They were from Lamar, Colo., Wyoming and Valentine, Neb., and for close to an hour, the 12 of us shared that small place as the rain poured, the thunder roared and hail pounded the roof before we finally decided to make a break back to the clubhouse.

We were drenched by the time we got there and, after sitting around for fifteen or twenty minutes longer, I called it a day and went home. Thirty minutes later, Bill calls to tell me there's sunshine at the golf course and to come back out. I did and as we were playing the 9th hole, another storm clipped us, and we had to putt through the hail stones that littered the 9th green. That's what you do when you're addicted to golf. Hopefully, the bad weather did its thing and left the area in time for the Mullen classic this weekend.