August 9, 2005
The Lost Weekend
Posted by pete at August 9, 2005 10:11 AMEvery year, give or take, several of us* who have known each other for a varying number of years (since 1980, in the case of myself and peenman) get together to drink beer and swap tales of ribaldry that become sadly less ribald as we get older. Most of us are married, some of us have kids, and all of us are incapable of letting go of the fact that we can no longer survive for an entire weekend on nothing more than three hours of sleep, a case of Schaefer, and a jar of Vlasic pickles a day.
These are usually camping excursions, alternating between both coasts and the Lone Star State depending on whose turn it is to host. Last year, someone (and I won't take credit unless it makes me look like a visionary instead of a wuss) suggested that we didn't necessarily have to, y'know, camp. As it was TheDave's turn to host, and he lives in San Diego, we ended up renting a beach house in Rosarito, Mexico.
"Roughing it" means different things to different people. In this case, we had to deal with only the basic DirecTV package. And no TiVo. Somehow, we soldiered on. Here's the view from our balcony (check out the sturdy south of the border craftmanship on that railing):
I only made that trip a few times, as visions of my drunk, broken body getting scooped up my seafaring organ harvesters kept playing in my head. The view from the beach was pretty nice, however:
Not visible in this shot are the porpoises lurking just offshore, or the vast armadas of kelp waiting to ensnare our brave heroes.
But you'd rather hear about shameful drunken hijinx, I imagine. True, much beer was consumed, and my own particular problems started when I switched to Bushmills some time around midnight our second night. Whether it was fear of federales, or an unwillingness to compete for space with a gaggle of SDSU freshmen discovering the wonders of Cuervo shooters for the first time, we didn't get into a lot of trouble in town. We went in on Friday afternoon for lunch and to have a look around, and as the below picture indicates, it seems fairly harmless in the daylight:
Our nighttime excursion on Saturday didn't go well for yours truly, as I was suffering from either a) food poisoning, b) pregnancy, or c) delayed reaction to the Bolton appointment. Combine my gastric distress with the locals' love of fireworks, and you had sort of cross between Roy Munson's bathroom scene in Kingpin and the Omaha Beach landing. I don't use the word "surreal" much, but I think that qualified.
As fun as the trip was, my attempts to get back home were less so. Continental booked me and another guy into the same seat for the flight home, than pulled me off that plane and stuck me on one leaving six hours later. Much as I enjoyed numbing my ass at the Terminal 2 bar, getting home at 4:30 AM on Monday kind of sucked. As did the $45 cab ride home. This is only the latest in a long line of screw jobs by Continentnal, and I composed the first draft of my letter to the airline over a few beers, and hope to edit out most some of the profanity before sending it off this week.
Anyway, I'm back now. And relatively sober. We'll see how long that lasts.
* peenman, seadogs, TheDave, and Sir Not Appearing In This Blog
Dude, that sucks. You should have given us a call and we would have come back and picked you up. As it was, we (The Dave, peenman, and myself) kept drinking at the Sheraton East just down the street until we took peenman back to the airport at around 7:00. My liver has fairly curdled and I feel like my lungs need to to aired out and beaten like a carpet.