Whoa, big weekend for the Kenagys. I feel like I’ve been beat with a stick. The good news is we actually went out and celebrated my birthday, the bad news is I am apparently too old to celebrate.

We flew out to Denver last Thursday with the Martins, for the sole purpose of my birthday. OK maybe not, but I’m going with it. Upon our arrival, we picked up a sleek, sexy minivan rental, because that’s what 41-year-olds drive. We then drove this hot machine over to Ed and Kim’s place to begin the weekend festivities. First on the agenda was the Killers concert. I wouldn’t say these guys are exactly my favorite band by any stretch, but we wanted to check out Redrocks Amphitheater, and that’s who was playing, so that’s who we went to see. The event took a nice upswing when one of Ed’s buddies called him before the show and offered him some passes to what he described as “the best seats in the house.” When we got there we made the rather arduous climb to the top of the theater and met up with this guy, who gave us some “FOH” stickers to wear. It turned out these things were like two steps below wearing a halo. There was no assigned seating, so it was pretty much a “get there really, really early if you want a good seat” kind of deal. With our super-duper stickers though, we waited up until the first band started, then trotted right down to a roped-off section around sixth-row center. So, while everybody else was getting jostled around by 15,000 screaming, bouncing knuckleheads, I had my required 15 feet of space around me on all sides and an awesome view. Perfect!! On the downside, The Killers only played two songs before the lead singer was supposedly stricken with a mysterious and sudden case of bronchitis. However, I would venture a guess that there were some fans in the crowd who were more upset with this than I. We’d been there a few hours, the second band was pretty good, and I think I was starting to suffer some inner ear damage from the excessive volume level. So, we feigned a little disappointment and started the march back to the minivan. At this point I have to at least attempt to relate a rather humorous event, although it likely falls in the “you had to be there” category. During our trek back to the car, Martin felt a sudden compulsion to go wandering away from the group, which was certainly of no surprise to anyone. He saw some markers off on the side of the road, somehow determined that these marked a trail head, and took off full tilt into the darkness. Unfortunately, he quickly and painfully discovered that they instead were marking a rather precipitous drop-off. Unaware of this misfortune, the rest of us continued on to the car. After several minutes of waiting, we started getting a little antsy and began hurling some rather misguided comments back in his direction. Luckily, he was eventually able to pull himself out of the ravine under his own power because I’m not sure we ever would have caught on that something just might be amiss. On the downside, he’d taken such a tumble that it knocked his wallet out of his pocket. It was apparent that we had absolutely zero chance of finding it in the dark, so we had to just drive home. Between this mishap and the header that Ed took in the bleachers, we made up a pretty bruised and bloodied group of concert-goers.

Friday, we started the day with a tasty breakfast at Lucile’s. After laying down a delicious base for the day, we loaded up the van and headed back to Redrocks to look for Chris’ wallet. In what everyone agreed was a certain good luck omen, he found it pretty quickly, right at the bottom of the ditch he’d tumbled down. Plus, we all got a good laugh at his expense looking at the cliff he’d run off; it did indeed look painful. Buoyed by this bit of good luck, we headed on up the hill and explored the amphitheater and took lots of pictures; it was quite a cool place. They have a visitors center with all kinds of history on the place, and you could walk down and check out the stage, and just generally interesting junk. After walking around there for a while, we headed back to the small town at the base of the hill and enjoyed the weather out on a cool roof-top deck. The name of the restaurant escapes me… some Mexican place. Doesn’t really matter, we were just enjoying the afternoon. After a while we headed back to Denver and hooked up with Todd, who had just driven in from a little vacation in New Mexico. We took the light rail down to Coors Stadium and caught a Royals game, and they actually won?!?! Most likely they knew it was my birthday and put out a little extra effort. And speaking of baseball and my birthday, Donette gave me tickets to the Yankees vs. Mets game at Yankees Stadium next month. This has many levels of coolness; It’s the last year the Yankees will play in this stadium, it’s a big “rivalry” game, and we’ll be sitting in the bleachers in New York on a (hopefully) fine June day watching a baseball game.

Wow, that was a lot of typing, but I’ll briefly summarize the rest of the weekend. Saturday we drove up to Fort Collins and spent the whole day up there. We toured Fat Tire Brewery, had a good lunch at a local restaurant, and went to a little festival that just happened to be going on. We managed to find all these fun places with much unwanted assistance from Todd’s stupid talking GPS, which he kept changing the language on to make it even more annoying and useless than it already was. The good news is I thought I wanted one of those things until I spent 3 hours in a car listening to one, so he saved me like $300.

Sunday we finally took it easy and just sat around Ed and Kim’s house, where several of their friends joined us for barbecuing and playing cornhole. It was relaxing but for some reason I still feel pretty beat-up today, likely because we didn’t get to our house until around 11:00 last night. It ain’t easy being 41.