Regular readers of my column know that I like to take trips and do things I haven't done before and they also know that my sojourns last summer left something to be desired. In fact, some of them turned out to be disasters. But I've always believed that just because something bad happens once or even more than once, it has no bearing at all on what will happen next. I believe that because I believe that life is a series of random events and that one outcome has no bearing at all on a future outcome. For example, if one flips a coin ten times and it comes up tails nine times in a row, the chance of it coming up tails on the tenth flip is still 50/50, just like it was on the very first flip. Each flip is a random flip, just like every life event is a random event.

Realizing that enables me to do a lot of things that perhaps others would shy away from after they've had a few negative experiences and because I carry that attitude with me in life, it allows me to have some wonderful experiences that I might otherwise not have had. Such was the case a couple of weeks ago. My buddy Norm (The McCook Chef) and I went to Denver to go to a concert and catch a Rockies baseball game and, unlike last summer, this trip turned out to be near perfect.

We took the train to Denver early Wednesday morning and, of course, it was an hour and a half late getting here, like it usually is. However, that wasn't a problem because we didn't have any place we had to be until 7:30 that night for the Doobie Brothers/Chicago concert at Fiddler's Green in south Denver. The bar car opened at 6 a.m. so we bought a couple of "eye-openers" and went to the observation car where we sipped on them and watched the scenery as we made our way to Denver. I said in this column last summer, after my ill-fated train ride to Reno with Coach Bonow, that I would never ride the train again and I was thinking about that on the ride over. It reminded me that none of us should never say never when we're thinking about future events because things are always changing. My round-trip ticket to Denver cost $88 and, with gas prices being what they are, there's no way I could have driven to Denver and back for that, not to mention parking fees, dealing with traffic, etc. So I took the train. I WON'T ever take a long-trip train ride again, unless it's with the right person, who happens to be of a different gender than Bonow and Norm, but the much shorter train ride to Denver wasn't bad at all. In fact, we made up a lot of time and arrived only 30 minutes late. We walked down to the Delectable Egg and had a great breakfast, then grabbed a shuttle bus for twenty bucks apiece and rode up to Blackhawk to do a little gambling. It snowed on us as we were going up the mountain in the middle of June and that was a first for me.

We played a little Blackjack at the Colorado Central Station Casino and I quickly made enough money to pay for my trip. They have a special game of Blackjack that pays eight to one whenever you win three hands in a row and since that's the basic betting strategy I use to play Blackjack in Vegas, it made sense to play that game exclusively. After I had made enough to pay for my trip, I quit and watched Norm play the slots. He was eventually able to pay for his trip too. Employees there said they've seen a pretty significant downturn in business since the statewide smoking ban went into effect in Colorado. In fact, it's a pretty strange situation out there because a lot of people who drink also smoke and, because of the laws, it's impossible to do both at the same time.

You can't carry a drink outside the casinos and you can't smoke inside. So if you want to smoke, you have to go outside which means you can't drink and if you want to drink, you have to drink inside which means you can't smoke.

After four hours at the casino, we took the bus back down the mountain and took the light rail out to our hotel, which was only a block away from the concert site. I don't know how many of you have ridden the light rail in Denver but it's a magnificent mode of transportation and it's dirt cheap. It runs through downtown Denver, stopping on every block to pick up riders. As it goes away from downtown, it morphs from a trolley into a train, and then almost into a plane as it rides the elevated rails over the regular rails. From downtown to south of the Tech Center, the ride cost us only three dollars each. A cab would have obviously cost a lot more. When we got off at our station, we called the hotel and they sent a courtesy van to pick us up and the next morning, took us back to the station at no charge too. With the transportation system they have in Denver, there's literally no need to drive a car over there at all.

There were nine thousand people at the concert we attended and we had third row seats. It was a great experience to actually be able to see the facial features of the members of the bands and to watch them play their instruments. Although the tickets were expensive, Norm and I both agreed it was the only way to watch a concert and it will be the only kind of tickets I get in the future. The best part of the concert was the finale, when both bands took the stage to play six of their greatest hits. Sixteen guys playing guitars, drums, and horns while they were singing their hearts out made this one of the best concert experiences I've ever had.

The next morning, we took the light rail back into town after breakfast at Gunther Toody's Diner, a great retro diner with a completely '50s motif. Once we got back to town, we went to a great little place called "Illegal Pete's" which is just a few blocks from Coors Field. It's a hole-in-the-wall bar and restaurant that makes some of the best Mexican food there is, according to the regulars we talked to while we were there. We had a couple of drinks there before going down to the Sports Column for lunch. After lunch, we went to the ball game and got seats in the club level which is a perfect place to watch a major league baseball game. Even though the Rockies lost, there were a lot of runs scored which made it a pretty exciting game.

After the game was over, we walked down to The Keg Steakhouse and had a wonderful meal before we took the train back home, arriving about an hour late. We figured out that we had slept about six hours out of the past 48, but there's always time to sleep later. The only thing that didn't go as planned was the train had no cold Coors Light for Norm to sip on the way home but he made do with something else. To emphasize even more how good the trip was, the train home was the last train to run east for the next 10 days because of the flooding in Iowa.

So it was a great trip. After a day of rest, I drove to Arkansas to spend Father's Day with my boys and I'll write about that next week.