My wife and I started our first real vacation in a long time a few weeks ago. To say it was epic does it no justice. 7 days in Cancun followed by a weekend in New Orleans is packing a lot of debauchery into 10 days. In order to preserve these memories before I wipe the rest of my brain cells out on the 4th,(note: I took a really long time writing this because I’m lazy) I’m going to preserve my story here. I’m also enlisting DJ Lance Rock to spin the soundtrack for this vacation.
Pitbull – I Know You Want Me
We booked a 6AM flight out to Cancun in order to maximize our time there. In order to maximize my suffering I didn’t sleep the night before leaving. So by the time we reached our destination, Temptations Resort in Cancun, I was already drunk on sleep deprivation. The drinks I started pounding after that didn’t help matters.
A word on Temptations, it has a reputation as a “swingers resort”. This is more or less true in that there were swingers at this resort. However, they weren’t in the majority and there was no pressure to be a swinger if that’s not what you’re into. My wife and I weren’t interested and no one cared.
So day one was about getting there and me drinking too much. Day two was about hangover recovery and taking it a little easier, except for the part where Danny entered a drinking contest (second place). Day three we decided to loosen up a bit and so we spent the entire day drinking in the “sexy” pool.
Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
The sexy pool features a swim up bar, topless women and the entertainment staff. The swim up bar speaks for itself, you swim up, you drink. Tops were optional at this pool, hence the topless women. Lastly this is where a lot of the day time “events” took place: Danny’s drinking contest, an arm wrestling contest for the ladies and many others designed to reduce the amount of clothing worn and increase the general blood alcohol level.
We spent our third day there after having breakfast. We failed to leave the pool for lunch and we failed to leave for dinner. Thankfully we did apply sunscreen. At some time after 7pm we made our way back to our room and passed out. My memory of this day ends at around 5pm. I woke up at 4 in the morning wondering what the hell happened but at least it was in my own room and Danny was with me, and in just as rough a shape.
Day four was spent hiding from the sun as much as possible. I recovered from my hangover first and went to a club with some friends we had made at the swim up bar. The club was Coco Bongo. I was skeptical at first as there was a show. In my mind show = cheesy entertainment fit for senior citizens and children. I put shows in the same category as marching bands. That category is “things that would be improved by dinosaur attacks or alien invasions”. This show wasn’t half bad. I then spent the rest of the night dancing and trying to help one of my friends get laid (I failed, he was hopeless)
Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
Throughout the week, the group stage of the World Cup was happening. I may get ambitious and write about that in another post. For now I’ll limit myself to these observations. I love the World Cup and I should watch more soccer. Also, it’s better to play soccer with English soccer fans than it is to watch soccer with those fans. They take their team a little too seriously.
Anyway, the rest of the week is getting a little blurry. We spent time on the beach or by the sexy pool. I played soccer with the aforementioned English types and we hung out with the same crew I went to Coco Bongo with. BTW, the ringleader of that crew was a guy named Andrew, who is better at picking up women than anyone I’ve ever encountered in my life.
I generally have nothing but contempt for the pickup artists of the world since they’re usually assholes who prey on women with shitty self esteem. This was not the case with Andrew, whose game was a mix of boldness and creativity. He was also a genuinely fun guy to hang out with. So it was easy to understand why women would be interested. Sometimes you just have to step back and appreciate the skill. Of course I might be singing a different tune if I was also single and thus competing with him for female attention.
Kings of Leon – Sex on Fire
Danny and I both went out to a club on our last night there, along with Andrew, Wayne (the guy I was trying to help get laid at the other club) and some older unpleasant women that Andrew was sleeping with (I think he had stopped trying by this point, she was pretty, but a genuinely unpleasant person). Danny and I spent some time trying to hook Wayne up with someone (anyone?!?) and we danced till sometime after 3AM. An awesome time was had by all. We even managed to team Wayne up with a German girl who, unfortunately, had no rhythm (guilty feet?).
Jay – Z – Empire State of Mind
The next day we reluctantly got our shit together and after some ATM mishaps that caused me to pay $10 in fees to take out $20 (really), we flew to New Orleans. The flight itself was challenging because we had unwittingly given ourselves only an hour layover in Houston. One hour is not enough time to do anything in Houston’s airport which was build to maximize inconvenience. I know everything is bigger in Texas but really, a half mile between the gate and customs, really? We missed our connection to New Orleans but there was another one an hour later so, no big deal.
A few words on New Orleans: It is not, yet, covered in oil or a deserted ghost town. While the downtown has recovered from Katrina, the rest of the city has not. They’re still down about 200K from the pre-Katrina population. Despite that, Bourbon Street continues to be a mad house every day of the year.
We arrive in New Orleans on a Friday afternoon, met our friends at the hotel, dropped our crap off and went for dinner. The theme of this evening was, of course, the shake weigh (pictures are available for those of you who know me on Facebook). I’m not really sure what we did exactly. There was definitely a hand grenade involved (the drink) and Danielle may have spent some time trying to catch plastic hand grenades in her cleavage. It all made sense at the time. There was also karaoke but I failed to sign up for “The Wild Rover”. The shame still haunts me.
Shakira – Waka Waka
Saturday morning we woke up with one goal in mind. Find a place where we can sit and watch the US play Ghana. Eventually, we found ourselves at a country western themed bar and took over all the seats at the bar. They had 3 for 1 beers, we got drunk, the US lost, we left in a cloud of drunken sadness. In order to combat sadness, some of us decided to maintain our drunken state by purchasing roadies and wandering the streets of New Orleans.
Early on in this process I gave in to some drunken asshole’s request for $2. Not sure why I did that, he caught me in some random moment of weakness with a sob story about needing bus fair and I was too drunk to see through it. Needless to say, I not only saw him moments later using my $2 to buy beer, but I kept seeing him again and again. It wasn’t a constant thing, just enough to remind me that I got suckered. I have a hard enough time letting momentary lapses in judgment like that go in the first place; the constant reminders did not help.
The best way to put something like that behind you is to replace it with good memories and/or alcohol. So Danny and I trekked across New Orleans with those of our friends who weren’t nap taking losers. We eventually found our way to the river where Lang (it was his bachelor party BTW, did I mention that?) rented a homeless guy’s guitar and played some Oasis for us. The Rent was $2 and a couple of beers. I can’t remember if Lang was any good or not so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for sheer balsyness.
After that we sexually harassed some statues, visited the mall and the casino and returned to the hotel to clean up. At this point we hooked back up with the nap taking losers to get ready for a night out. Since the whole point of being on a combined Bachelor /Bachelorette party was to take the Bachelor and Bachelarette out, that’s what we did. This is what I know for certain. We spent some time at Pat O’Brien’s, there were at least 2 bachelorette parties there and we hung out with them. Random pictures were taken. I made it back to the Hotel alive.
That’s it. The next day Danny and I scraped ourselves out of bed, got to the airport and tried and failed to get an earlier flight. Eventually we did make it home and then I spent like eleventy two days writing this entry. The end.
Epilogue
This has very little to do with anything but I showed Danny this commercial and she totally didn’t get it.
She was like, “Wait, why is this funny?” and I’m like, “Duh, the Cantina scene from Star Wars!!?!?”
Danny, “What cantina scene?”
Me, “I don’t even know you anymore.”
Adidas – Star Wars Cantina Commercial
My Thinking Corner 
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