Sunday, July 7, 2013

A Twittering of a Bachelor Party for the Bros

This weekend was my brother Colin's bachelor party.  Being that I didn't know many of the guys going, and being one of only two married guys on the trip and the only person who didn't drink, I was slightly apprehensive going into the weekend.  Would I have fun?  Would the fact that I didn't drink and had a wife to answer to at home bring down the overall enthusiasm of the rest of group?  I wasn't sure, but I figured my contribution would be to drive the RV so the rest of them could drink to their livers content and not worry about driving home.  The plan was to spend the 4th of July at Gearhart beach and then take an RV over to a cabin near Odell Lake in Central Oregon the rest of the weekend. Below are some tweets from the weekend, which we tagged #allthebros









This was no joke....the grass and sand in the backyard of this house was ablaze after people got impatient lighting briquettes.  I actually had someone hand me a couple of red solo cups and say "hey buddy, if you've got extra hands, we've got a fire out back and we could use all the water you can carry."  I'm not sure what my 24 ounces of water was going to do, but he certainly seemed to think it would make all the difference.






That was pretty much the standard Bro attire for this beach party.











I don't know if any of you have ever been to Gearhart for the 4th of July, but it's insane.  People everywhere.  There's cars parked on the beach, and everyone brings an insane amount of illegal fireworks.  There's groups of people ever 50-60 feet or so setting off fireworks in the dark.  On the beach.  Many of these fireworks need to be anchored so they can launch into the air.  When you're drunk and lighting fireworks with either a lighter or, in the case one particularly drunk bro, a campfire in the middle of dozens of people, you don't have time to anchor your firework properly.  This led to fireworks tipping over on the their sides or firing off a low angles directly over people's heads.  I saw one guy light a firework no more than five feet from a group of people walking back to their car who had no idea he was there.  You know, because it's pitch black and he's wearing dark clothing.  While lighting fireworks.  It's the most unsafe situation you can imagine.  It's miraculous that nobody got hurt.













Like I said, it was scary.  It got increasingly scarier as the night wore on.






The aftermath of the beach party.





I am not an experienced bro partier.  I brought a sleeping bag, but no tent and no headrest.  I had to bum a spot in a tent and hijack a "pillow" from Grant's car.





Now the real bachelor party began.  We shed some of the excess bros and got down to a core group of 10 or 12 guys and headed for Odell Lake....well sort of.





After about seven very disorganized conversations, we decided to meet up with a few guys who were driving separately in Portland, with the idea of swinging by the Warm Springs casino on our way before hitting Bend and then rolling down to Odell Lake.  Once we met up with them, we finally realized that they didn't want to go to the casino and Bend on the way, because then they wouldn't be able to drink all night.  So we then headed right back down I-5 South.  It was about an hour detour that never needed to happen.





This tweet is EXACTLY what the 3 hour drive to Odell Lake was like, and really is how you could sum up the entire weekend in 140 characters or less.





This house was AWESOME.  The garage had a separate apartment above it, complete with fridge and dishwasher.  The view off the back deck was spectacular.  I was pretty jealous that I didn't have access to a house like this all the time.





It was closer to an hour and a half.  I haven't done something like that in over a decade.  I was struggling.





I believe her actual quote was "I've been riding dirt bikes my whole life," but you get the idea.  Yes, we ended up at a "gentleman's club" in Bend.  It was the third time in my life I've been to one of these houses of ill repute, and probably my last.  It was entertaining, but in all the wrong ways.  I found a comfortable spot on a couch in a corner and tried to keep to myself, but it's impossible in a place like that where the ladies are doing their best to separate your money from your wallet.  One thing I learned is that I'm horrible at talking to strippers.  I tried to talk to them like actual people, but they're like actors who refuse to break character.  One girl came over to me and said "you know that dream everyone has where they're naked in front of a group of people in public?  It's funny, I don't have that dream anymore!"  I was dumbfounded.  Like what do you say to that?  I mumbled something about how it probably feels less weird with every day, and she got the hint that I wasn't interested in talking about her disrobing anymore, she quickly moved on.  Later on in the night, another girl comes over and starts chatting with us.  She said something about asking her anything, because she always tells the truth.  I said something about that being an admirable quality, and she says "well, when I used to be a really good liar, but when I was ten I got caught telling a lie and my daddy disciplined me real good, and I haven't lied since.  I don't know if she was telling the truth or lying, but either way, it was one of the creepiest things I've ever heard.  I think she intended it to be sexy, since I got the impression that everything they do is supposed to be sexy.  It was anything but.  She went by the name Vixen, and was impressed that I knew the definition of "Vixen."  This led to me telling her that I knew what a vixen was because it was the name of the girl fox in "The Fox and the Hound."  Like I said, I suck at talking to strippers.  She seemed totally flummoxed as to what to do with me, but I think maybe she hung around because I wasn't trying to talk her into taking her clothes off and was happy for the break.  She then started talking about how she was divorced and had two kids, so I gave her a few bucks just because I felt like I had to (for the kids!) and that was that.  Time for the long ride home.





The next day we had rented a pontoon boat on Odell Lake.  We, naturally, weren't moving too fast in the morning and didn't get out to the lake until about noon.  The weight limit on the boat was 1800 pounds or 13 people.  We had 13 people, but probably closer to 2500 pounds.  Also, it was super windy, which was really whipping the water around.  While driving out to a good spot to hang out on the lake, the surf was so bad we had to basically zig zag across the lake, because driving straight out would've sunk the boat with all the water coming over the sides.  Fortunately, the wind died down and we had a pretty good time just hanging out and swimming on the lake for about six hours.  I'm not sure the same could be said for the local wildlife:




One guy brought Navy Seal Firecrackers, which are basically tiny explosives that will still explode underwater.  This was entertaining for about three crackers, but after that it lost its allure to me.  Not everyone got bored with it though.  There were probably fifty to sixty of these things detonated over the course of the day, most followed by at least one person giggling or going "Whooo!"





This sounds pretty vulgar (and it is) but it's something of an inside joke amongst these guys, and doesn't involve any actual "plucking of chicks" or expectation of future "plucking."  Still, it must've sounded pretty awful to other people on the lake, especially considering that there was only one girl on our boat with twelve guys.  AWKWARD.





I wrote that at about 10:30 last night, and I was under the impression that everyone was exhausted and would be going to bed soon.  I've never seen Pandora streaming radio used to the extent it was this weekend, and I probably heard the same twenty songs or so on loop for 72 straight hours.  That's probably fine when you're intoxicated most of the time, but when you're sober, it gets old.  Also, I was wrong about the party winding down.








They went hard until about 3:30 am.





This was my nickname for the weekend.  I was dubbed "MVP" because, as one guy put it "I'm pretty sure someone would've crashed the RV or been arrested had you not been here."  In all, I was pretty impressed with the way these guys, most of whom had never met me, made it a point to thank me multiple times for doing all the driving.  I appreciated it, and actually had a lot more fun that I thought I would going into the weekend.  These bros were alright in my book.





I was actually having a conversation with one bro, and he fell asleep right in the middle of it.























The drive back was much more low key than the drive over.  The music was a little quieter, the dice game a little more reserved, and even the traffic was surprisingly light.  I think these are all signs of a super successful bachelor party weekend.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try to sleep for about 10 hours before going to work tomorrow.












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