I just got back at 3 a.m. today from a long weekend in Denver with my son Sam, the best 16-year-old in the world. Flew over, watched two Colorado Rockies vs. L.A. Dodgers games and came home on Amtrak’s California Zephyr. I took no laptop, answered no voice or e-mails. I’ll write more tomorrow. Just wanted y’all to know we are alive and had our fill of major league baseball. And I really relished those railroad geeks we met on board who swear they will never travel by any other means than trains. And newly converted to train travel as I am, I’m starting to understand the romance of it all!

That’s it.

I’m done.

No more Tour de France for me. No more professional cycling races of any kind for me.

With two top riders out and under suspicion of doping, with teams dropping off all over the place and scandalized, I’m not one whit interested anymore in what happens in the sport. I’d rather put my energy behind professional wrestling. It’s more legit.

Pathetic, all of it.

I like what British rider Bradley Wiggins said. He rode with Cofidis, which quit the Tour on Thursday after Italian rider Christian Moreni got sacked over suspicion that he used testosterone.

“It makes you think about your future as a professional cyclist,” Wiggins told the British newspaper The Independent. “You ask what is the point, I could do better things with my life.”

Me too, Brad. So long, pro cycling.

The real reason we went to Santa Barbara, Solvang, Ojai, Santa Clarita, and Long Beach last week was for the BICYCLING!

Here is one of the best blogs with photos I’ve found yet on all the Amgen Tour of California action. The saddest news to come out of the race is that two of my favorite racers, Utah’s Dave Zabriskie (riding for CSC) and Big George Hincapie (still riding for Discovery Channel) got hurt. Zabriskie was DQ’d with a concussion after crashing on a mountain road landing during the first stage. Hincapie broke his arm but managed to ride hurt through most of Stage 6. He’ll be recovering for six to eight weeks.

And naturally, Levi Leipheimer was a total stud. I always take pride in the fact that I am no star sniffer. I have no inclination, ever, to hover around the streets of Park City for the annual Sundance Film Festival snooping for stars or wannabes. Yet put me within a few hundred years of these lean and lightning fast pro cyclists and I go all liquid.

Case in point: We’re driving on Interstate 5 late Saturday afternoon. The road is jammed. And what are the chances we would drive right up behind a little Mazda sedan with four Trek racing bikes perched on top and the Discovery Channel logo plastered all over the car with the number 1 on the rear window?

“Is that him?” “Is that Levi?” we’re pretty much shrieking from inside our sensible rented mini van while trying to catch up to the car. Ted is the first to see the man’s shaved head and svelte profile and confirms it: “THAT’S LEIPHEIMER IN THE FRONT SEAT!”

He manages to zip up to the right side of the Mazda. We suddenly go all ape like a bunch of teenage girls watching the Beetles enter Shea Stadium 40 years ago. Except we have two men in the car, too. They were just as bad as any squealing female, believe me.

And that was my brush with fame.

I have been to California approximately 317 times in my lifetime (give or take a dozen trips). My friends and relatives live up and down the state — from Sacramento to San Francisco to Orange County to San Diego. And also some creepy little inland desert towns you don’t even want to know about (Cue the “Deliverance” banjos now).

So why is it whenever I visit CA., as Ted and I did for the last five days, I morph into a complete rube when I get there?

I’m telling you, it’s like this dream place where I expect Glinda the Good Witch of the North to come floating along in a giant Ivory Soap bubble.

First, there is the growing season. And the green. Every shade of green: Kelly, chartreuse, pine, Granny Smith, olive. Green all the time. Did I mention flowers? Everything is in bloom. The impatiens and begonias I grow in Utah look like salesman’s samples of the technicolor giants that flourish in California gardens. Even the freeway medians are wildly blooming. I can’t keep from gawking and gasping at the sights.

Here I am, standing in a field in Solvang, California. It’s nothing spectacular. But it’s green. And the sky is blue. I love it.

Next, I must mention the liquor scene. Walking into any Ralph’s, Von’s or Albertson’s supermarket, I immediately submit to the magnetic force of the wine department, pulling me in its direction. My eyes swell to seven times their normal size. I grab whomever I’m with by the sleeve, insisting he or she follow me over to the massive display of Napa or Russian River wines. Oh, and those Santa Barbara pinots? Wow. Look over here, Ted! Just like “Sideways!”

Of course, this is all due to my Utah upbringing and the fact that I’ve survived my adult years as a victim of the Utah liquor store phenomenon. When I visit any state with sane liquor laws I shift into instant hayseed mode. It’s unbelievable one can walk into a store, grab a chilled bottle of white on the way to a dinner party and be through the whole experience in under 11 minutes.

Guess what else? In California, you can even buy a corkscrew or a couple of limes in the liquor store! And cold beer, too. How exotic.

So nice to make a purchase without feeling like I’m standing in line for bread and potatoes under the old Soviet Union market system.

So, the trip was great, especially for this hick.

As I mentioned late last week, the real reason we went to CA. was for the final stages of the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race. Ted is the executive director of The Tour of Utah race. We traveled with several of his erstwhile staff members — volunteer directors, fundraisers and sponsorship directors, as well as a couple of members of the Utah Sports Commission.

Here are two of those travel companions: Michael Spencer, left, with Karen Kaull Weiss. Michael is a former U.S. Olympic moguls skier and attorney specializing in professional sports issues. Karen is Ted’s right hand in the Tour of Utah and an event planner by profession. Both are great fun.

Besides shooting bad photos, all I had to do for five days was wander around, gawk at wine displays, and look at gorgeous hard bodies on racing bikes. Then it was home again, where I am happy to be. It’s snowing like hell right now, it’s lovely, and it’s home.

Late Thursday afternoon, Ted and I will board a plane to Santa Barbara, California. We are joining about a half-dozen others involved with the Tour of Utah road bicycle race. We’re going to watch the final segments of the Tour of California race. We are gathering intelligence. My husband Ted is executive director of the Tour of Utah bike race, scheduled to take place in Utah during the last week of June.

Oh, don’t worry. It isn’t a junket. The Tour of Utah is paying our way, fully.

Mostly, I am going to soak up the sun, taste the wine made famous in the film “Sideways” and support the man I love. We’ll start in Santa Barbara and Solvang and end up somewhere near Long Beach. I’m a good soldier. I’m just going to do what they tell me. I’ll yell and cheer a lot for the bike racers (though sadly, our native son Dave Zabriskie dropped out after getting hurt during a course pile-up crash two days ago), but I’m truly going because I want to chill with my best friend/husband and to support him. I hope I can send some mojo Ted’s way to help all go well for the Tour of Utah. Getting it going and supported here in Utah is a considerable challenge.

This is how it works when you truly love someone. We give to each other and we get in return. See, I didn’t have much of this in previous marriage/relationships. Perhaps I was too proud to give up a piece of myself — didn’t want to look weak and insignificant, you know. Well no more. Ted and I support each other; we give where needed and revel in that, really. I’m old enough, wise enough to know that offering up my best self to another really matters. If four days in California comes with that sacrifice, well who am I to argue?!

I’ll probably file some blog entries from California. I’m taking my laptop. I’ll try to log some photos, too. Please check the blog. I won’t give up if you don’t.

Call it a liberal woman thing, but I’m both mystified and wildly amused by recent comments in Salt Lake City sports columns about former Utah Jazz center John Amaechi’s revelation that he is gay.

As revealed in his forthcoming tell-all memoir, Man in the Middle, Amaechi lived a safely closeted life in SLC’s gay community (which he calls the “hippest and gayest” east of San Francisco. Hoo-ah!) during his two-year tenure with the Jazz.

I think this is fascinating. I think the news is groundbreaking. Sure, other professional athletes have come out in the past three or so decades, but only a handful. Breaking barriers in pro sports such as going public with homosexuality is, even in 2007, a big deal. And Amaechi is the first NBA player to do so. That’s quite amazing. And brave.

But I am showing how at least where sports stories are concerned, women are from Venus and men are from Mars. I believe most women who saw this story considered it multi-layered. They probably felt some empathy for Amaechi. Bad enough that he was an awful player, but then he had to conceal his true self from everyone around him, too. Women who appreciate sports and good sports writing (put me, a former Tribune sports editor, in that camp) would want to know more.

With the exception of Phil Miller, lead NBA writer for The Salt Lake Tribune who has covered the Amaechi story fully and professionally for the last two days, local columnists’ treatments of the topic have been unreal.

Check here, here, and here for how three male sports columnists scramble to distance themselves from a topic that still sends shivers down most straight men’s spines.

How do I know that? It’s the universal distancing factor they all fall back on. It’s the fact that these writers can’t ignore an important, even titilating story, but they haven’t figured out how to seriously address it.

They don’t want to come off as — god forbid — homophobic. Hey, no worries there! These guys haven’t run their own mental traps enough to even be accused of homophobia. They aren’t even there yet. It’s easier not to face the issue of gay athletes and what it means in the world of pricey, all-encompassing, macho-drenched professional sports.

So what we get instead from columnists Monson, Luhm, and Rock is this theme of apathy. It’s “who cares if he’s gay,” “this is news?” and “why are we even writing about this?”

But then each spins out 20-plus column inches about why he is writing about this.

Or, in Luhm’s case, a whole treatise on how Amaechi completely sucked while playing for Coach Jerry Sloan and drew too fat a paycheck from Jazz owner Larry H. Miller.

What do we make of that argument? That being the untalented slacker he was, it’s no surprise that Amaechi is gay?

It’s like the old argument about not seeing black when dealing with African-Americans. “I’m color-blind when it comes to race,” white people will say in their efforts at tolerance and inclusion.

But ask a black person if he or she wants to be invisible.

And ask a gay man who might like to be open while playing in the NBA how he wants to be perceived?

Not, I’ll bet, as someone to be ignored, brushed off and discounted with an eye-roll and a “who gives a rat’s ass?”

Anyway, here is a more thorough round-up of what NBA players think of Amaechi’s news. I love the quote from former Utah Ute Mike Doleac, always a smart guy far beyond his ability on the basketball court.

Peter Corroon started out with a bit of a stutter, a pause. He mistakenly said “Salt Lake City” when he meant “Salt Lake County.” He grinned slightly at the glitch, corrected himself. Then, following a wind-up that — in the shiny political kind of way — nicely stroked the stakeholders in the Salt Lake Real soccer stadium deal, Corroon broke the news.

Salt Lake County would not cough up tax dollars for the stadium in Sandy. The end. For 2 1/2 years this game has been dragging on. Now it’s over.

Real owner Dave Checketts says so. Speculation still runs toward Checketts locating on old Geneva Steel property in Utah County. But as of this writing, he is still talking about selling the team, gathering up his Tinker Toys and moving on.

You can analyze this ending a dozen different ways. I was in the audience on October 12, 2005, just a few hundred yards from the proposed Sandy stadium site. Checketts and his confab announced their plans to move the team’s home from the University of Utah to Sandy. I’ll never forget it. I wrote about that day more than once. What really struck me then — sticks with me still — was the body language among all those proud guys in white shirts and ties. So much backslapping. Such confidence in the future.

There was this long line of South Salt Lake Valley Republicans — Sandy Mayor Tom Dolan and Republican Speaker of the House Greg Curtis (who represents Sandy), as well as Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. Checketts was running the news conference with a whole entourage of handlers and team boosters.

But curses! There was that little matter of what Salt Lake County might do. After Checketts had introduced his backers, he suddenly summoned Corroon to the platform. It seemed like a total afterthought. It felt like the guys had the deal greased, but it might be nice to invite Corroon up for a few minutes at the grown-up table.

I’m not saying this one moment predicted the final outcome. I’ve talked with plenty of county officials involved in the negotiations for $34 million of hotel taxes from Salt Lake County, and I’m convinced Corroon and others wanted the numbers to work. (Corroon has committed to putting $7.5 million toward youth soccer programs and facilities, BTW.)

The numbers did not work. I’m sure grinning, hopeful men at that stadium announcement long ago imagined they would wait Corroon out, delay delivery of the real financials (remember, Real Salt Lake didn’t reveal them to the county until mid-December) and get what they wanted.

Checketts may be a professional sports icon, a solid businessman, a hometown hero and all-around nice guy. But based on information from county experts, financial evaluations by an independent company and the county’s debt review panel, Real couldn’t prove solvency on this deal. And almost as troublesome, Checketts seemed determined first to build a commercial empire (concerts, retail, etc.) and then, a soccer stadium. It should have been the other way around.

I asked the mayor at today’s press conference if he thought the principal actors in this drama had sold his ability short, or flat-out dismissed him. He said he always tried to work in good faith. His top concern, he said, was the debt level and his responsibility to county taxpayers. Another reporter mentioned Dolan’s public complaint that would tarnish Salt Lake County’s image among big investors nationwide. Surely, Dolan predicted, this would energy for others interested in locating here.

Corroon’s reaction: “I guess my answer is, then don’t bring bad projects to Utah.”

Pundits all over town are predicting the county, the whole state, will regret this decision. It seems soccer will pass us by. We’ll be standing around, our mouths hanging open, looking like the people on the platform who were fussing with our luggage, our passports and purses and missed boarding the bullet train.

Hmm, maybe.

But for now, we’ve got a county mayor who had a hand on our wallet. I think it’s going to work out fine.

The following is a guest entry by Ted Wilson, mountaineer:

My former student and now friend, Christy Karras of The Salt Lake Tribune , wrote an interesting story today about mountaineers and death. She wrote about the coming weekend’s production by the SB Dance Company of “This Mortal Coil.” The show features the life and times of Al Burgess, a Salt Lake City climber who has earned a world-class reputation for his high mountain climbs and exploits. I know Burgess. He is an engaging man who climbs the climb and minimizes the talk, just as Karras tries to get to the essence of climbing.

Karras says in her article, “When mountain climbers get together they always talk about the same thing. They talk about death.”

And now the SB Dance Company will apply the art of dance to the mission of climbing a mountain. It seems mountain climbing has finally permeated the culture deeply enough to have traditional art mediums like dance join the burden of explaining why human beings rope up, suffer incredible hardships of cold and harshness, put themselves in grave danger of dying, just to summit a worthless piece of real estate. As the great French climber Lionel Terray said, “Conquistadores of the Useless.” (Terray climbed huge mountains around the world, but he died on a a short rock climb in south central France.)

George Leigh Mallory, whose body was found on Mt. Everest seven years ago by Salt Lake climber Conrad Anker, said prior to his fatal expedition to Everest in 1924, “I climb Everest because it is there.” And that pithy, even prosaic, comment has been the best explanation of the human desire to climb ever since. Perhaps art, now, can move the explanation needle further up the gauge.

But my lifetime of climbing and my opportunity to rub shoulders with the greats of climbing — the Burgesses, the Ankers, the Unsoelds, the Whittakers, has taught me death is about the last thing that enters the mind of the alpinist. Mind you, I was never a climber like the greats, but I listened when in their presence.

Climbers love life beyond normal. They love life so much that the process of endangering themselves makes them feel really alive. My old climbing club had a standard saying when leaving a secure ledge to head out onto the rock where the chances of falling could overwhelm. It was, “Out of the womb and onto the shooting gallery.”

The expression captured the essence of your butt hanging out over a couple thousand feet of space where a fall would result in injury or death. Somehow, you gathered courage, finished the lead to the next secure ledge and, as Winston Churchill said, “There is nothing in life quite so satisfying as being shot at without result.”

But “death?” Only in the full essence of denial does the mountaineer think about death and its horrible, grim, and decisive conclusion. No, we skirt around it as climbers. As our friends get killed, and sometimes they do, we carefully analyze why and say to ourselves we would never make that kind of mistake. When climbing we think no more of death than a skydiver, a car racer, or a soldier does. Sure, it is back there in the recesses of the mind, in the core of the brain, but it does not come to the surface because if it did, we would simply quit in the middle of the very thing we choose to do in celebrating life.

If you go to a climber’s party, death is not the issue of the evening. Climbers are more intent on the women in the room or the beer they are drinking. Denial goes a long way.

So dancers and artists, you are welcome to replace the rather dull and boring literature of mountaineering (there are a few exceptions) with a new interpretation of the foolishness of climbing. But don’t look to death as the explanation. Look more to why we want to live.

Blogmaster’s note: Ted Wilson has climbed mountains around the world since 1958. He has pioneered routes throughout Utah’s Wasatch Range, the Tetons, and in Europe. No, he hasn’t climbed Everest, but he endures me, his wife, daily.

In this 1964 photo in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Ted Wilson is third from the left in the back row. Climbing phenom and outdoor apparel guru Royal Robbins is next to Ted, wearing the white beret. His wife and business partner, Liz Robbins, sits in front of him. Photo credit: Dick Wallin.

I can’t add any more superlatives to the list for Elaine Elliott. The University of Utah women’s basketball coach clinched her 500th career victory Thursday night with a 73-57 win over Colorado State.

Watch Elliott on the court. Listen to her humble, almost self-deprecating views of her remarkable 24-season run with the Utes. She’ll go on about how she took over for her legendary predecessor, Fern Gardner, at a moment when she was scarcely a few years older than the athletes she coached. She’ll smile slightly and mention how she manages to recruit stellar women every year.

And look at her teams. Last year, the Utes reached the NCAA Elite Eight; this year, with a younger squad, everyone is talking about “building.” It’s always tough as a fan to sit through a season like that. But we know Elliott. It’s all going to be fine.

One more note in general about women athletes, and specifically, Elliott’s teams: When was the last time you saw or heard of any of them strutting around and groping someone at a downtown bar, ala Utah QB Brett Ratliff, or BYU starting point guard Rashaun Broadus, kicked off the team this after his arrest for suspicion of drunken driving. The Cougars seem to be fine without him.

Women are such a superior species in sports. I love these Ute women. And Elliott? Just keep going.