May was an eventful month for me. I realize my posts have been a little lengthy as of late (and only once a month), so I'll try and keep it short and just cut to the chase.
Mike's Bachelor Party in Montreal (May 5-9):
Mike's official bachelor party had been planned for months to be held in Montreal in early May. As the best man, I tried my best to make sure everyone and everything was planned for the 4-day weekend we'd be going.
I flew out to D.C. on Monday night to hang out with Mike for a few days and make sure he didn't travel to Montreal alone. We arrived in Montreal on Thursday morning and about half of the party joined us that day. We kept things fairly simple, making sure to get checked in, get drinks for the room, and then checked out the area around us within walking distance. The thing with big bachelor parties (and there was 14 guys in this one), is that getting everyone to remain on schedule is like herding cats. Time just drifts on and even when you plan ahead for a couple extra hours, it's really tough to maintain schedule. We ended up eating dinner around 10pm, then found a strip club for night one.
On Friday, the rest of the part joined us. I kept things simple, trying to only schedule one major event a day. On this evening, we were scheduled to go to an indoor racing track called Action 500 at 5pm. These go-carts were legit and could reach speeds of up to 40mph. We were able to get the entire track to ourselves and there were three 10-minute legs: a practice period, a trial period, and a position period. They had the ability to track your lap times to the millisecond, which determined your position. Pretty cool for as cliche as it originally sounded.
After karting and dinner, we found a lounge/club that was very trendy and popular. It was $100 a person, but that included cover, 4 large bottles of bottle service, and obviously Mike's portion. It was a chill place because they also had pool tables, a basketball game, and a table hockey game. It was also severely crowded and because we all had just paid $100 for our bottles, we made sure we drank all of the liquor, so we were all pretty fucked up at this point. Mike even managed to get himself tossed out of the place for starting a fight, lol.
Saturday was the main day where I had planned a trip to the local casino and the main strip club we'd be heading to later. The casino was fun, mostly because the US dollar is strong in Canada (75 cents to the dollar), so gambling was a little more affordable than usual. The casino also ran long and because we had to ensure getting to the strip club by 9pm, I audibled dinner plans and just ordered a bunch of pizzas for everyone at the hotel.
The strip club was great, as they are similar to Vegas in the amount of touching you can do. However, the girls in Montreal are absolutely gorgeous. I'm pretty well traveled now and I can't believe how many beautiful women live in that city. So take that to the club and well, you're gonna have a hard time saying no to a lap dance from any of them.
Come Sunday, most people were leaving, but a few stayed back and weren't leaving until Monday. We found an axe-throwing place that was pretty fun. You throw hatchets at plywood with targets on them and we made a double-elimination tournament out of it.
After axe-throwing, we found a gaming arcade bar, one of those places with retro arcade games and consoles like Nintendo 64, where you pay $7 Canadian to play for as long as you want. It was here that I also met my wife from Canada. Her name was Cat, the bartender, and she was the hottest gamer chick I'd ever seen....period. She was playing Hearthstone on her iPad while working the bar, so I talked to her about that and eventually played a couple games against her. Apparently we were there for 4 hours, which is how long I hung out with her, haha. Whatever, I had been taking care of Mike and the guys all weekend already, so I didn't care at that point.
We left on Monday, so that about wraps up Montreal. I will admit that this was possibly the best bachelor party I've ever been to. I'm not just saying that because I was the best man in charge of organizing everything, but the destination had a lot to do with it, plus the people. The bar for bachelor parties has officially been raised and this one will be hard to top.
Colorado Springs (May 9-12):
I flew directly from Canada to Colorado Springs on Monday. I've accepted new responsibilities at IBM in addition to my current role and part of that includes traveling for work. I'll be traveling on quarterly to places like Colorado, Portland, San Jose, etc.
I had actually never been to Colorado before, so this was a treat for me. I was only needed there for Tuesday, so I had plenty of time to sight-see (weird, I know, but what are you supposed to do when you travel alone?) on Wednesday. I checked out Garden of the Gods during the day, then went to a work dinner that evening. Traveling for work is alright since you eat really well, but it's tough to exercise daily and I gained 5 pounds over the 10-day trip by the time I finally arrived home in Tucson. :(
Mike's Wedding in Allentown, PA (May 19-23):
A couple weekends later, I flew out to Pennsylvania for Mike's wedding. I've attended about 18 weddings in the past decade and have been in the wedding party for 7, but this was my first time ever as best man. There were certainly added responsibilities, namely preparing a speech appropriate for my best friend over the past 20 years.
Nate, Kevin, and I all flew from Phoenix on Thursday and landed in Philly that night. The next morning, Mike's soon to be father-in-law offered to take the wedding party out for a round of golf with him and his sons at Brookside Country Club. I've been playing a lot more golf recently, so I was really excited to be playing a course in Pennsylvania. Nate, Kevin, Andrew, and I participated in a 4-player scramble and shot a 92 on the day (the course was a Par 71). The weather and course was beautiful that morning.
Friday night was the rehearsal and dinner. Mike's parents selected a great restaurant called Melt and I got the swordfish steak for dinner. It was quite filling. After a few words from Mike's dad, we proceeded to drink the night away and take the after party to the Sam Adams bar at the Holiday Inn where we were staying.
Saturday was the wedding with the ceremony at 2pm. Mike got a nice limo-shuttle for the wedding party as we traveled to St Joseph the Worker Church to get ready for the ceremony. I like how Mike tried so hard to pull a fast one on me, saying that he gave me the rings the night before at the bar while I was drunk. I denied it and continued to deny receiving the rings, because no matter how drunk I get, I am very good about remembering what happened the night prior. He eventually gave me the rings and the rest of the ceremony went very swimmingly, only lasting 30 minutes altogether, which seemed very reasonable to me.
Pictures followed at Lock Ridge Park and Furnace and while the forecast was rain that day, there was only a light sprinkle here and there fortunately. Reception was at 5pm back at Brookside, which is where I delivered my best man speech that was well received.
You can watch it here on my YouTube channel. The reception went by quickly with dinner and dancing, followed by another after party at the hotel bar. And so concluded the wedding of my best friend Mike from middle school.
On Sunday, Nate, Kevin and I drove back to Philly to catch the Braves@Phillies game, since I like to go to a sporting event whenever I visit a new city should their home team be playing at the time. We got seats in the outfield and the Phillies won easily 5-0. A couple of friendly girls we met at the game showed us around the Xfinity Live center of bars across the street after the game as we continued our day drinking. Later that night, we went out around the city of Philly near our hotel, checking out McGillan's and their local Fox and the Hound (which sucks compared to Tucson by the way).
On Monday there was some sight-seeing involved before we headed back to Phoenix. The flight got home later than I thought it would, so I decided to head back to Tucson the next morning.
San Fransisco (May 28-30):
My grandmother passed away a year ago, so there was a one-year memorial service held in Redwood City over Memorial Day Weekend. All of my aunts and uncles were there as well as a few of my cousins, so it was kind of like a big family reunion. The memorial service was on Sunday morning where all of my grandma's children said a few touching words (7 out of their family of 8, one of them had passed away a few years ago). A dim sum lunch followed shortly afterwards.
Later that afternoon, somber feelings aside, my cousins Will, Jason, and Jerry went to Golden Gate park where Jerry's friends were playing sloshball. That's basically kickball where you always play with a drink in your hand. It was a great day out and the whole afternoon was a ton of fun. We then had Shabu for dinner and I played some beer pong with Jerry and a couple of his friends before calling it a night.
Overall, it was a nice service for my grandmother and it was great to see and hang out with my cousins...it had been a while.
I'm almost done with my busy months. Next up in the month of June is the 9-ball and 8-ball city tournaments, E3 in Los Angeles, and Chris's wedding in Seattle. And then I'll finally have a nice break for a while! Hope all is well with everyone and thanks for stopping by!
