Another short excerpt from the book - Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America, out May 2010 - which our lovely publisher has kindly allowed us to post. This one’s about an unplanned overnight stop in Vail, Colorado.

Note that like many of the blogs we’ve posted to this page, the action involves us either trying to do something and failing, or just failing to do anything at all. This is because we’re saving the really exciting stuff – the bits where we try to do things and succeed – for the book, which costs money when it comes out in May. We hope you won’t be offended by this. If you are, keep in mind that old saying from the world of publishing: ‘Books with people trying to do things and succeeding cost money. Blogs where they try and fail do not’.

This one is in bold for Joe and, er … unbold for Chris:

We fell short of reaching Denver by sundown and settled instead for Vail, which competes with Aspen, a couple of hours west, for the title of ‘American ski resort most likely to cripple you financially if not actually’. (Aspen holds the record currently; killing a member of the Kennedy family scores triple points.) Excited at the prospect of enjoying a night on the tiles in one of the world’s most prestigious mountain resorts, we checked into the least prestigious lodgings we could find in order to conserve pennies for a ‘massive night out’ in the village.

In season, Roost Lodge is the ideal place for Vail’s youngest and least affluent visitors to sleep off a hangover. Off-peak, it apparently served as a dosshouse for the hundreds of construction workers bussed in to make the place ship shape for the start of the season. And us. We checked in, then immediately jumped in a taxi up to the village in order to avail ourselves of all that’s available in Vail.

Pre-season Vail at night is what Harrods must be like after the doors have been locked and the cleaners move in. It’s pristine, unspeakably pretty, but unutterably dull. After a brief look around we found the only place with more customers than staff, an Italian restaurant and bar called Vendettas, and tucked into a pizza just smaller than our table.

But pizza wasn’t why had come to Vail. We were two red-blooded males starved of excitement for days in the desert, and we wanted action. I quizzed the waitress as to the possibilities for stimulation in Vail off-peak. She disappeared and returned a moment later brandishing a card detailing something called a ‘Pub Crawl’ taking place every Tuesday night in the village. All we needed to do was drink one beer in each of five bars dotted along the main street, and we would be entered into a prize draw by the host venue after midnight. Prizes included tickets to see the Denver Broncos, and a snowboard.

We did the math. There were approximately fourteen people in the resort at the time, most of whom were either behind a bar or at the wheel of a taxi, so the odds were stacked in our favour. How could we lose? Drink some beer, stay up until midnight and win a prize. This should present no significant problem for two hard-drinkin’, street-fightin’ fellas like us. Bring it on.

In fact we turned out to be a couple of softies for whom the prospect of drinking more than three alcoholic beverages in anything approaching quick succession was scarier than a baby with fingers for eyes. We managed one more beer in a bar round the corner, which turned out not to be a participating venue anyway, and retired to bed, pooped. We tried our best to convince ourselves that, well, it had been a long drive hadn’t it, and this prissy place probably couldn’t handle us anyway. But there was no escaping the fact that we were two grown males faced with near-certain odds of winning a prize relating to extreme sports or football, and neither of them were sufficient incentive to put away a measly five beers. We picked up our handbags and left.

Dumping our handbags on our separate beds in our separate rooms, we separately flicked on our separate televisions. The men on mine were playing rounders, only not.

It’s all too often said how bemusing and baffling cricket is. But the implication has always seemed to be that all other sports are simple by comparison. Football, bar the offside rule, is almost as simple as it’s possible to be, with the possible exception of boxing (or ‘hitting’ as I’ve always felt it should be called), but baseball seems every inch as complex as cricket.

And I now had the perfect forum to learn the complexities, the peculiarities, and the delights of a sport that my father first tried twenty-six years ago to get me into. That forum was the World Series. This year the St. Louis Cardinals faced the Detroit Tigers. We didn’t know that the series was on until meeting up with Punk Rock Mike in LA, where we had watched part of the deciding game which took St. Louis to the final. The Mets lost, but if you get the chance to glance at You Tube, look up ‘chavez catch mets’ and witness the most extraordinary catch you will probably ever see in sport. The ball was not just heading out of the ground, it was out of the ground. Chavez though ran to the fence and jumped so high, arched his arm back so far, and tilted his glove so much that he caught the ball despite its being almost two feet over the fence. When he landed he had the same look of disbelief that was on every face in the crowd. If life were the movies they would have gone on to win the game, and then the series. It isn’t, and they didn’t.

Which brought us to where we were today. After three games of the World Series, St. Louis led two games to one. This, we were told in an array of bellowed sportspeak, was a big deal for them. Seventy-two per cent of game three winners in the last nine years had won the series, and sixty-four per cent of away teams with pitchers over 6’ 2” had won two consecutive games in Detroit in the last four seasons. And of course ever since Roberto Alomar hit the winning home run for the Toronto Blue Jays back in ‘92, no avian-themed team with Hispanic lead batsmen had lost in the World Series. I made some of those statistics up, but in the context of the absurdly over-analytical world of baseball stats, they’re entirely plausible.

Baseball coverage has long since crossed over from meaningful interpretation of events to a hybrid of statistics and superstition. And how baseball fans love statistics. It seems they simply can’t bear to admit that this might be just a sport, susceptible to human error and – dare we say it – luck. Apparently it is a holy sporting algorithm that one day men with abacuses will be able to predict with total accuracy. At which point presumably the teams won’t even have to play – the managers can just announce the teams and the bean-counters will determine in a matter of minutes who the winners would be, thereby saving the messy business of actually having to play the game.

It was too early to know who the star of the series would be. We couldn’t yet know which batsman, pitcher, catcher or baseman would be the hero of this year’s contest, but I already had a favourite. I’m sorry to say that he was my top choice not for his skills on the field (though he appeared to be something of a talismanic bat for St. Louis), but for his name. Whilst the name Albert Pujols didn’t make me laugh per se, I was cheered when he took the field by thoughts of small children across America falling to the floor and choking on their chips when the commentator said (and the phonetics are important here): ‘We’re in the eighth innings and it’s getting pretty sticky at the bottom for St Louis – which means one thing – it’s time for poo-holes.’ If I listened carefully I could hear moms all over America tutting as they wiped spittle-flecked popcorn from the fifty-six inch plasma screen.