Ahhhh, four-day weekends are GOOD.  Our long weekend started developing last Wednesday, at the Brooksider of all places.  We happened to be down there having some dinner, and griping about a problem we’ve been having with our car.  For the last several years (yes, YEARS) the Accord has been bedeviled with this problem where, when the weather gets hot, it won’t start.  It will run like the finely engineered foreign auto that it is, and then BAM, you come out from work and can’t get home.  It might start five minutes later, it might not start for two days.  We’d taken it to our regular mechanic a few times for this, and mentioned it to the dealer, but they could never replicate the problem while it was there.  So, we’re sitting around the table bemoaning the fact that we basically have no four-wheeled transportation when it gets over 80 degrees, and one of the guys at the table says “Oh, I know exactly what that is, that happened to my Honda.”  OK, yeah right, somebody named “Flop” knows the answer to the mystery of our non-starting car, which our $100-an-hour mechanic has assured us is absolutely the oddest problem ever to beset a vehicle.  And not to discount ol’ Flop’s word or anything, but just out of interest I go home and Google “honda doesn’t start when it’s hot.”  What do you know, my mechanic and myself are the only people in the free world who don’t know what the problem is.  The moral of the story?  1.)  Always Google any problem you’re having, somebody else is having the same problem.  2.)  Flop knows everything.  (Incidentally, buoyed by this success, I searched on a problem I was having with my Palm Pilot and fixed that too!  Wonderful times, people.)

Anyway, first thing Thursday morning, Donette took the car up to our (NEW) mechanic and he fixed it right up.  We were so excited by our new-found mobility that we decided to take a road trip;  All we needed was a destination.  We did a little quick research to find the best available entertainment in the nation over the Labor Day weekend, and found that Night Ranger was playing in Denver!  Wow, what luck!  We got there late Friday afternoon and hooked up with Ed and Kim, who kindly put us up for the weekend.  The big show was Saturday night, and lived up to our every expectation, easily overshadowing the DMB show we went to last Tuesday.  Those guys truly put the “power” in “power ballad.”  Our only regret was that Donette cut off her hair just a few weeks too early, so she wasn’t able to get her 80’s bangs on.

OK, so they were just as over-the-top cheesy as they were last time I saw them, circa 1987 or so;  I can’t really remember that far back.  The most noticeable difference between the shows was that last time they were at sold-out Kemper Arena; this time around they were doing a free show at the Taste of Colorado festival.  Other than that they were pretty much identical.  And our weekend didn’t really center around the concert.  We visited Golden for an afternoon, ate lots of good food, (including some fresh Hatch green chiles,) played some cards, and generally relaxed.  As a bonus, our car reliably transported us both ways, SWEET.