Gmabling with the Weather in Colorado

So, here I am in Colorado this week and I'm gambling with the weather to see a baseball game tonight. I bought tickets to the Rockies vs. Brewers game for tonight. All week it has started to rain in the afternoon and has been getting pretty violent after 5pm. Last night, I went to meet a friend for dinner I hadn't seen since high school. On my way, I thought I was going to have abort and turnaround. The rain started, then hail started. Cars were scarmbling for cover under anything they could find. Even under the 75 foot overpass that was about 10 feet wide. Have you heard what hail sounds like on a car when you're driving at at 55mph? Try this. Put a metal bucket over your head, get four or five friends to pound on the bucket with the handles of screw drivers. See if you don't freak out from the sound. Lucky for me, the hail lasted all of about five minutes and I was able to conitnue on.

Fast forward to today, and the rain starts up again like clockwork at about 3:30pm. It is just pouring down. People in the downtown streets below were running for cover. One poor lady ended up with a broken umbrella from the 40+ mph winds. I checked the weather on the 'Net and found the rain was supposed to stop around 6:30pm. Game time is at 6:40pm. I'm within walking distance, but I don't want to get stuck in the rain nearly a mile from my hotel. That would suck and probably get me sick.

So here I sit in my hotel room after getting off from work waiting and watching to see if the weather will break enough for me to get to the stadium. I've got my chips on Black. The ball is slowing down and bouncing bewteen Red and Black right now.

--Live update-- I see sunlight hitting a building nearby. The online weather radar is showing there will be a break in the next few minutes and stay that way until much later tonight. I think I see the ball settling on Black. Winner, winner! Chicken dinner!

Let's go see a Rockies game sitting in the 2 row from the edge of the left field foul line. This is gonna be a great seat to watch a game in a stadium I've never been to. I'm hoping for a foul ball to come my way. Wish me luck.

How to Make Cabbage with Lettuce

So here’s a question. If you opened a restaurant and served only salad would you expect to hit it big or be laughed out of town? Here’s the answer… You’ll hit it big. I went to a place called Green Fine Salad Company in Denver, CO for lunch today based on the recommendation of one of my customers. The menu was nothing at all like Kravers in Wisconsin. Now, Kravers was pretty good and had a ton of selections. Green’s has a 12 item menu with the option of creating your own healthy salad. The twist is you can get them in a bowl or a wrap. The portions are plentiful and all salads are prepared fresh right in front of you. A couple of slicers, some dicers, and a tosser, and voila! You have a freshly prepared salad of your choice with your name on it. Literally, they put your name on your salad. Now you can respond, “Yes, it does have my name on it!”

I think this restaurant is a fantastic concept. It offers healthy food choices, drinks from local companies, and an easy price on the wallet. Oh, yeah, the food is pretty good, too. It’s not often you get to enjoy a healthy food choice. I certainly enjoyed mine.

This has been a traveling review brought to you by the Nomad Consultant. I review all kinds of places wherever I stay during my travels. Stay tuned for more travel reviews.

Tokyo Joe’s – Japanese Cuisine to Go

When in Denver you don’t typically think – “Hey! I got an idea! Let’s get some sushi in Denver, because they should have some great local seafood to offer.” Well, I did. Well, it didn’t really happen like that. I actually found some restaurants nearby my location in downtown Denver and found Tokyo Joe’s filtering towards the top of the list. Google Maps places this in categories of Japanese Restaurants and Fast Food Restaurants. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Whenever I have sushi, it’s never considered fast food. Well, consider this. I ordered an 8-piece sushi roll and it was at my table in less than 5 minutes. That’s some fast sushi. Joe’s was an easy walk away from my client site down through the 16^th street mall.

I had the Joe’s Roll – Shrimp, Avocado, Cream Cheese, and Cucumber wrapped in seaweed and finally in rice with sesame seeds. Presentation was typical of something related to fast food. I got my wasabi and ginger on the plastic black plate, but my soy sauce cup was a small plastic cup covering my wasabi and ginger. So far, this is nothing exciting and nothing I would call home about. Well, I probably would call home, I would just make sure to have something else to talk about, since the conversation night last about 18 seconds. The roll looked pretty good and tight. Everything looked fresh and smelled good. The wasabi was pretty potent. It’s kinda hard to screw that up, though. So I take my first piece and dip it into the sauce, carefully mixed with some wasabi, and my roll began to fall apart as soon as it hit the sauce. Man, that sucked. The sticky rice was not soy proof. My pretty soy sauce cup with wasabi now has floating pieces of rice and sesame seeds. Oh, well… I scooped up what I could and hoped this was just a one off. It tasted pretty good so that encouraged me to try again with another piece and it was better. It held steadfast and I didn’t lose anything this time. That bite was pretty tasty. I mowed through the rest of remaining pieces having to utilize my chopstick martial arts to get out some portions that broke up in the soy sauce.

Overall, I liked the sushi. I didn’t like having to use ancient Japanese chopstick martial arts to get at the pieces that broke up easily in the soy sauce. I didn’t like that fact that they were out 2 of the 4 Black Tea options when it was just barely past 1pm. I did like the fact I was able to enjoy some pretty good tasting sushi for less than $10. I would probably return, but I might get there a little earlier since anytime after 12:30pm seems to be problematic for getting what you want to drink. I found out about another sushi place nearby that is not considered fast food and is supposed to be better. For under $10 I can’t really complain too much. If it stuck together better I’d gladly pay a few dollars more.

This has been a traveling review brought to you by the Nomad Consultant. I review all kinds of places wherever I stay during my travels. Stay tuned for more travel reviews.