Good sports
Denver, Colorado, like Chicago, Illinois, or Memphis, Tennessee, is one of those American cities where you can't say its name without automatically saying the state name too. It does add a lot of commas to your sentences though. 
Anyway, we were in Denver, Colorado, to meet up with some friends who were over here on holiday and we'd all managed
to get tickets to see local ice hockey team Colorado Avalanche in their last game of the season. Our friends had secured seats quite near the rink while Claire and I were somewhere up in the stadium's attic with the cheapest tickets available. After the first period, however, we got a text from our friends saying there were a few 
spare seats down near the front so we snuck into their section and spent the remainder of the game much closer to the action. And 'action' is probably the most appropriate word because it is one of the most frenetic sports I've ever
watched. In fact it's so fast and furious that the players can only manage about 60 seconds on the ice at a time and there is a continuous string of substitutions in and out of the team box. There's only ever six players from each team in 
the game at any one moment but there are about 20 of them in constant rotation, so it's hard to keep track of who's on the ice at any one time. In fact it's 
hard to keep track of most of the game, especially the puck which is quite small and moving at such a speed that it's difficult to know where the thing is until a klaxon sounds to let you know it's come to rest in one of the goal nets. Sometimes the location of the puck is irrelevant anyway as, every now and then, the 
teams will take a break from the game to have a mass brawl.
As we'd seen at the basketball in San Francisco, there is a lot of fan participation during the game with free T-shirts being flung into the crowd between periods or signed team equipment being given away or even little radio-controlled
inflatables floating around the crowd dropping vouchers for food and souvenirs. Given the slippery playing surface there are obviously no cheerleaders
(I actually think seeing scantily-clad girls trying to stay upright on ice might be fun) but there are some lads that come out to clean the ice in between each play and at one point they took it upon themselves to down tools and do a little dance routine! Not quite as sexy as girls in hotpants but entertaining all the same. At the end of the game
there was a thing called "The Shirts Off Our Backs" where 20 'lucky' fans went down onto the ice and each received the smelly 
wet shirt directly from the player who had just spent the last couple of hours sweating in it. Nice. The game ended with the Avalanche being thrashed 6-1 by the Nashville Predators. As happened with the basketball, we don't seem to bring the home team any luck when we watch them.
We went back into Denver, Colorado, again a day or so later just to have a look around
the city. That was the plan anyway. We stepped off the bus and immediately got caught up in a heaving mass of thousands of people all wearing purple. Even though it was a Monday, everyone seemed to be drinking and were in high spirits so we sort of let ourselves get swept along with them all and ended up outside Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies. It turned 
out it was the first game of the baseball season. It was all very exciting and, naturally, we wanted to join in and were just wondering whether or not we could afford to spend money on seeing yet another sporting event when a miraculous thing happened – I suddenly got a tap on the shoulder and a woman shouted "Happy Christmas!" as she thrust two tickets into my hand. We couldn't believe our luck and immediately hugged her. She, Andrea, and her husband, 
Monte, were supposed to be at the game with two friends but those friends couldn't make it so they had decided to give their tickets away to two people who looked like they might be grateful. We were VERY grateful. They were a lovely couple and, once we'd furnished them with drinks, we joined them in the stand to watch the game. The other great advantage to meeting Andrea and Monte was that we now had someone who could explain exactly 
what was going on – and for the next couple of hours they had to endure a lot of questions from two baffled Brits trying to fathom the mechanics of what looked like it should be a simple game. But there were so 
many things that confused us – like how is it possible that someone with a massive leather glove on, who is paid $15million just to catch balls, is not able to catch a ball?
There is a lot of money in American sport but it still astounded me that they only use a baseball for a couple of throws. As soon as it's hit or touches the dirt they discard it, sometimes into the crowd for a lucky fan to catch or sometimes into the bin. As well as the balls that are tossed into the crowd there is a surprisingly high number of stray balls that are hit into the crowd during play. Sometimes these will arc up into the stand where someone will catch it and keep it, sometimes a small scuffle will break out between 
over-zealous fans vying to claim ownership and very occasionally a ball will get smashed into the crowd at great speed and completely ruin someone's day – we saw one guy get stretchered off on a golf buggy because he'd been knocked out. They also seem to go through a lot of bats which seem to split or 
shatter far too readily as they come into contact with a ball travelling at 80mph. In between innings there were, of course, lots of fan interaction which included T-shirts being catapulted into the crowd by a purple dinosaur, 
one guy winning $450 for playing bagatelle on the "Jumbotron" big screen and a confusing race between three people dressed as a tooth, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. The toothbrush won. Sadly the Rockies didn't, losing 7-0 to the San Francisco Giants. That's a hat-trick of losses for home teams we've supported!
We left Denver, Colorado, and drove to Vail so that Claire could show me where she used to live for a while, back in her ski-racing days. Vail struck me as a town that's desperate to be European. It has classic Alpine hotels called things like the Swiss Chalet, Austria Haus, Gasthof Gramshammer or Sonnenalp. It has a lot of Italian restaurants
and French cafés and, if it wasn't for all the American flags flying everywhere, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in Chamonix. Just down the road was an equally confused restaurant in the small town of Minturn, It's called the Minturn Country Club, has a golfing logo and a golfing theme – but no golf course. What it does have, however, is a butcher shop in one corner and an open 
grill in another, so that you can choose a nice bit of steak from one then season and cook it yourself at the other, just how you like it. Or over-cook it if you get chatting to someone and forget what you're doing. It's great fun and a brilliant way for a restaurant to not have to pay a chef. They also have a resident barman-cum-magician
who can bamboozle you with card tricks while you're stuffing your face. I should point out that, being on a tight budget, it was a real treat to eat out, we don't get to do it often and are usually sat in the van with a bowl of soup. That said, here's this week's…
BURGER OF THE WEEK
After last week's spicy behemoth, I went for something a bit more delicate this week. It was was from a place called Freshcraft in Denver, Colorado, and consisted a nice juicy 1/2 pound beef burger on a bed of avocado, spinach and rocket, topped with provolone cheese and tomato jam. Sophisticated and delicious – just like me!
Anyway, we were in Denver, Colorado, to meet up with some friends who were over here on holiday and we'd all managed
to get tickets to see local ice hockey team Colorado Avalanche in their last game of the season. Our friends had secured seats quite near the rink while Claire and I were somewhere up in the stadium's attic with the cheapest tickets available. After the first period, however, we got a text from our friends saying there were a few 
spare seats down near the front so we snuck into their section and spent the remainder of the game much closer to the action. And 'action' is probably the most appropriate word because it is one of the most frenetic sports I've ever
watched. In fact it's so fast and furious that the players can only manage about 60 seconds on the ice at a time and there is a continuous string of substitutions in and out of the team box. There's only ever six players from each team in 
the game at any one moment but there are about 20 of them in constant rotation, so it's hard to keep track of who's on the ice at any one time. In fact it's 
hard to keep track of most of the game, especially the puck which is quite small and moving at such a speed that it's difficult to know where the thing is until a klaxon sounds to let you know it's come to rest in one of the goal nets. Sometimes the location of the puck is irrelevant anyway as, every now and then, the 
teams will take a break from the game to have a mass brawl. As we'd seen at the basketball in San Francisco, there is a lot of fan participation during the game with free T-shirts being flung into the crowd between periods or signed team equipment being given away or even little radio-controlled
inflatables floating around the crowd dropping vouchers for food and souvenirs. Given the slippery playing surface there are obviously no cheerleaders
(I actually think seeing scantily-clad girls trying to stay upright on ice might be fun) but there are some lads that come out to clean the ice in between each play and at one point they took it upon themselves to down tools and do a little dance routine! Not quite as sexy as girls in hotpants but entertaining all the same. At the end of the game
there was a thing called "The Shirts Off Our Backs" where 20 'lucky' fans went down onto the ice and each received the smelly 
wet shirt directly from the player who had just spent the last couple of hours sweating in it. Nice. The game ended with the Avalanche being thrashed 6-1 by the Nashville Predators. As happened with the basketball, we don't seem to bring the home team any luck when we watch them.We went back into Denver, Colorado, again a day or so later just to have a look around
the city. That was the plan anyway. We stepped off the bus and immediately got caught up in a heaving mass of thousands of people all wearing purple. Even though it was a Monday, everyone seemed to be drinking and were in high spirits so we sort of let ourselves get swept along with them all and ended up outside Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies. It turned 
out it was the first game of the baseball season. It was all very exciting and, naturally, we wanted to join in and were just wondering whether or not we could afford to spend money on seeing yet another sporting event when a miraculous thing happened – I suddenly got a tap on the shoulder and a woman shouted "Happy Christmas!" as she thrust two tickets into my hand. We couldn't believe our luck and immediately hugged her. She, Andrea, and her husband, 
Monte, were supposed to be at the game with two friends but those friends couldn't make it so they had decided to give their tickets away to two people who looked like they might be grateful. We were VERY grateful. They were a lovely couple and, once we'd furnished them with drinks, we joined them in the stand to watch the game. The other great advantage to meeting Andrea and Monte was that we now had someone who could explain exactly 
what was going on – and for the next couple of hours they had to endure a lot of questions from two baffled Brits trying to fathom the mechanics of what looked like it should be a simple game. But there were so 
many things that confused us – like how is it possible that someone with a massive leather glove on, who is paid $15million just to catch balls, is not able to catch a ball?
There is a lot of money in American sport but it still astounded me that they only use a baseball for a couple of throws. As soon as it's hit or touches the dirt they discard it, sometimes into the crowd for a lucky fan to catch or sometimes into the bin. As well as the balls that are tossed into the crowd there is a surprisingly high number of stray balls that are hit into the crowd during play. Sometimes these will arc up into the stand where someone will catch it and keep it, sometimes a small scuffle will break out between 
over-zealous fans vying to claim ownership and very occasionally a ball will get smashed into the crowd at great speed and completely ruin someone's day – we saw one guy get stretchered off on a golf buggy because he'd been knocked out. They also seem to go through a lot of bats which seem to split or 
shatter far too readily as they come into contact with a ball travelling at 80mph. In between innings there were, of course, lots of fan interaction which included T-shirts being catapulted into the crowd by a purple dinosaur, 
one guy winning $450 for playing bagatelle on the "Jumbotron" big screen and a confusing race between three people dressed as a tooth, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. The toothbrush won. Sadly the Rockies didn't, losing 7-0 to the San Francisco Giants. That's a hat-trick of losses for home teams we've supported!
We left Denver, Colorado, and drove to Vail so that Claire could show me where she used to live for a while, back in her ski-racing days. Vail struck me as a town that's desperate to be European. It has classic Alpine hotels called things like the Swiss Chalet, Austria Haus, Gasthof Gramshammer or Sonnenalp. It has a lot of Italian restaurants
and French cafés and, if it wasn't for all the American flags flying everywhere, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in Chamonix. Just down the road was an equally confused restaurant in the small town of Minturn, It's called the Minturn Country Club, has a golfing logo and a golfing theme – but no golf course. What it does have, however, is a butcher shop in one corner and an open 
grill in another, so that you can choose a nice bit of steak from one then season and cook it yourself at the other, just how you like it. Or over-cook it if you get chatting to someone and forget what you're doing. It's great fun and a brilliant way for a restaurant to not have to pay a chef. They also have a resident barman-cum-magician
who can bamboozle you with card tricks while you're stuffing your face. I should point out that, being on a tight budget, it was a real treat to eat out, we don't get to do it often and are usually sat in the van with a bowl of soup. That said, here's this week's…BURGER OF THE WEEK
After last week's spicy behemoth, I went for something a bit more delicate this week. It was was from a place called Freshcraft in Denver, Colorado, and consisted a nice juicy 1/2 pound beef burger on a bed of avocado, spinach and rocket, topped with provolone cheese and tomato jam. Sophisticated and delicious – just like me!
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