I'm Back...

We had a very groovy time in Denver.

On Friday, we crammed many activities in after 2pm when Jonny got off work.
We stopped at "Hot Baked Buns" for lunch. This woman with amazing blond hair (big, bleached, and boufant) makes something between a pasty and a calzone. I got one with Italian sausage, onions and peppers. Came with marinara sauce on the side for dipping. Jonny got burger, cabbage and onions in his. He said it was also delicious.

Then on to Dinosaur Ridge.
Did I blog about Dinosaur Ridge yet? I think not.
It's pretty sweet! I REALLY wished I had my awesome Trike (aka "Rosebud"). It's a ridge full of dinosaur bones and tracks, hence the name "Dinosaur Ridge", just outside Denver. I have no idea which direction, but it's towards Golden.
For 3$, because we were there at 3pm and didn't have that long to spend, we took a bus up the ridge with very informative commentary by the driver, Dan.
150 million year old bones and tracks and stuff. Very cool. Well worth a couple of hours.

After that, it was Friday night and we were up for some cheezy good fun. SO, Jonny had found what he promised would be AWFUL community theatre in Golden Colorado.
So we book it over there. About 20 minutes in the car. Turns out, it was their 150year anniversary parade. Very amusing.
I especially enjoyed the ladies drill corps. I say ladies because if there was one under 30 years old, I'd be surprised. There also appeared to be a minimum weight for participants. Yikes~! But amusing. Very much the small town parade, but with some wealthy people thrown in.

Then, we had run out of time for a snack and headed right to the theatre, the Miners Alley Playhouse, to see "Over the River and Through the Woods." The grandson of a big Italian family is the last kid/grandkid to be in NY with the family. He has an offer in Seattle...what will ensue???? Hijinks of course. I was promised CRAP theatre. This was actually very good. As Angela pointed out (HI Ange!), Jonny and I are the only people she knows who would be disappointed to go to a play and have it be good. But really, I can't mock it. It was good.

The audience however....holy inappropriate touching, Batman. There was an older lame (literally...he had a bum leg) flabby guy and his honey....a plain jane thin chick. Both were looking at the rearend of 40...and they had to look pretty far back to catch a glimpse. And yet he was groping her THE ENTIRE TIME. Gross boob grabs, sticking his hand on her thigh and sliding it up (thank god she was wearing jeans). Kissing her neck while she pretended to fall asleep. They were repellent and staring at them made me miss a significant portion of the play. It was like watching an accident. I couldn't figure out why the people in the adjacent seats didn't get up and LEAVE since she kept bumping into the guy in the seat on her other side while she squirmed around to rub up on the big guy. THEN I saw that the adjacent couple were chatting with her when she wasn't being groped extremely obviously. PUKE. It's bad enough when it's teenagers but old people in a theatre! Get some dignity people. And while you're at it, get a room. No one wants to see that.

There appeared to be a foreign student who happened upon the place. How do I know/think that? Well, Jonny and I were some of the more heavily pigmented people in the room and our midwest dialects could have passed for foreign in that crowd. Whitey McWhitenheimer City. Except for one person apparently of Asian ancestry. He arrived alone and sat in the front row to the side of the stage. There were a maximum of 5 rows of seats on 3 sides of the stage. This person enjoyed the show immensely (as did the rest of us) though he had to crane his neck around a post sometimes.

There was an Italian buffet after the show as it was opening night, and Italian food featured in the play (at least references to it). We skipped because Jonny cried like a little girl through the whole thing and was all puffy. Maybe his undies were riding up. They said that the after show buffet is a tradition on opening night.

Instead of the cheese-fest (I'm low dairy) we went out for Italian food...hmmmm....at a bar/restaurant up the street. It was pretty good!

We ate like pigs the whole trip. I think I'm fatter now than when I left.
Jonny...next time we visit, let's have some fruit or something.

He fed me BEANS at every meal! Sometimes two kinds. All delicious, but that much bean does not travel well.

For our final day, Saturday, we got up late and had breakfast at some little hole in the wall joint in his neighborhood. It was fabulous. The woman running it had a voice like pure gravel (remember when Aunt Billie was still smoking? Like that). She saw my Loretta Lynn t-shirt and asked about the show. Then told us tales of seeing "The Boss" in 1976 or something. Springsteen is getting a bit long in the tooth if he's been touring that long.
The special was some skillet thing that sounded good except for the cheese and eggs (I like my eggs in cake, not as a main ingredient). I wanted that but without the eggs and cheese. She let me add peppers and tomato. It was lovely. I think I had chorizo, home fries, peppers and onions fried together. The tomato ended up on the side and was lovely. IT also came with a variety of side dishes. I want to go back.

After that we walked through some festival at the park, and on to the Tattered Cover bookstore which was lovely. I got the latest Erdrich novel for the flight and something for El Kid's trip to Japan. Jonny got an assortment of things.
After an exhausting hour at the bookstore, we were hungry again.

There is a place called "Ethiopian Restaurant". Right to the point. It's DELICIOUS and profoundly simple. I had some sort of spicy lentil stew. Jonny got some other sort of spicy lentil stew. The owner brought out a platter ....about 2.5 feet across.... covered with the traditional bread. I think it's called injira but I'm not sure. And a side plate with a few more injira on it. These are about a foot across and like a thick, sourdough crepe. Then soup bowls of the stew and some vegetables (cabbage?). We had a red stew, green stew, yellow stew, and cabbage stew. He put it right on the injira covered platter and we used the other injira in bits to scoop up and eat. No utensils. When you run out of side injira, you use what the stew was piled on. It was delicious. But much of the deliciousity is the bread and I have no idea how to make that! I don't have a skillet big enough to cook it on. But I will try.

On the way out (we were STUFFED), I read a review of the place on a paper clipping under the glass on the counter. It said that you'll do well as long as you don't lick your fingers (apparently a faux pas in Ethiopia) and don't ask for a fork. We didn't do either of those so we are probably welcome back. And lordy it was GOOD.

OK, I think that's most of it. From there it was off to the airport and out of there.