Party of 5

It’s amazing what can fit in my car for a weekend in AC, its also amazing how I can overpack. I’m usually so organized, picking outfits out that mix and match, along with shoes, but this time I brought way too much for the Annual Girls Weekend.  That’s just what is was and has been for the last 4 years, the annual girls trip for married, single, divorced, separated ladies.  Cheap therapy with your gal pals that is not limited to dropping a few $20s in a slot machine and sucking down a few cranberry and vodkas while discussions of children, hoo-hahs and men are not hushed.  Always that time of year to look forward to, I don’t know why any girls weekend or girls night is frowned upon.  Well, those of you that do, shame on you.  You have no idea what quality time with your gals away from your family or ‘kid free’ as an Angel put it, will do for your health.  It’s that break you look forward to, that reconnecting with your friends once a year to make new memories, play catch up, share photos, drink Starbucks and most of all have fun.  With that said on to our next adventure.

Within the first few minutes of dropping the bags in the room and venturing out to find food we were approached by a tall ‘Irish’ Bostonian (with an Irish accent) who couldn’t have been more than 25 and been my brother.  He of course, targeted me, the one who looks the most Irish out of the group.  Claiming he was with a group of 14 guys, all of which were ‘crashing in the room’ he tried desperately to find out where we were going that night.  The guy did not waste time, he even had a ‘young lad’ with him.  Being the smart ones we are, we deflected the question and he went on to ask if we were all single, trying to get our ‘lucky charms’.  Of course we answered honestly but he insisted he obtain one of our numbers.  So I not-so-kindly started to walk away and said “We’ll see you later” which in fact we did not.

We move on to bar hop, to celebrate a birthday, which if you are celebrating a birthday make sure the bartender knows.  You get better service that way, and if he’s cute he’ll pay attention.  The sports bar we ended up in had a huge cast of characters including firemen who didn’t have a calendar and Frodo who was their mascot.   Through a few winks and smiles, and men that seemed to only wink at our birthday girl and not have anything else to say we moved on to a late night fix of pizza, cheesesteaks and a grilled cheese.  Unfortunately this place was nothing like our infamous 4 am ‘noodle bar’ and Senor Pizza wasn’t back until noon.  How can you have pizza on the menu if the gourmet pizza chef only works half the day?

Finding a spot for five of us on the beach amongst families and those with children, away from anything that resembled the French guy in a speedo was a little difficult, but not unattainable.  We just had to pick the right spot, to be able to see everything and not offend anyone because we do not have a filter – there is no censor as to most adult conversations anywhere in public.  We had our SPF, our magazines, and in full agreement that the word ‘selfie’ was entirely worn out by this time.  We just continued to take silly beach ‘selfies’ of ourselves in between flipping the pages of SHAPE magazine.   Now the Beach Bar was a minor let down, our favorite bartenders no longer were there to serve one of us that killer drink.  We’ve had numerous occasions of ‘one woman down’ after drinking here.  Meaning at least one of us didn’t survive making it back out of the room at night after drinking one of their mixed drinks. I was one of them one year, and vowed never to do that again.  I missed an entire evening!  I’m still trying to understand the wardrobe malfunctions I saw, along with the ‘wolverine’ look alikes that paraded around holding their plastic fishbowl drinks.  How could their friends let them leave the house like that?  That’s where I come in with a camera..yup, smile, or don’t smile, you made the blog or at least your sneakers did.  

The guy I really wanted the picture of was wearing a suntan of a wife-beater with a sailor hat on.  Still wondering about that one – did he lose a bet?  We drank, we danced, we had fun, we even met a Peyton Manning look-alike who left his bachelor party drunk in the room to have a drink with adults.  The Angels thank you Mr. Best Man for the shot.  That was the highlight at the bar, unless you take the suggestion from the bartender to ‘not order the dirty banana’ while watching the ‘situation’ look alike get tossed out.  Who gets tossed from the beach bar at 3 in the afternoon?  I seem to have a lot of questions on this trip…but at least we’re not ‘babysitting’ like previous years.

After getting all prettied up and looking fabulous we head to dinner where I seem to be the only one taking notes watching another table which seems to be a bachelorette party (who would have guessed) actually hold up their food (with their fingers) to take pictures of it.  Chicken must be made differently in their town I guess.    We score a limo ride for the price of a taxi to Harrah’s Pool, we were riding in style - see saying its ‘someone’s birthday’ can get you places.  This is where it got interesting.  We got a discount at the door because we were all over 30, the club where I’ll never pay money to get into again because their DJ was horrible.  We also learned never give a camera to anyone under 25 to take a group picture, because he got down on one knee and shot up at us.  Dumbass.  No one got free drinks that night, not even the birthday girl.  But this is just the beginning as we all split up in groups to scour the place.  Three of us found observing a table of two guys, one wearing a suit all by themselves sharing bottle service to be interesting.  Think Chris Farley and Channing Tatum sharing a bottle service table by themselves.  Um hum.   In looking for the other Angels we ventured to the rooftop, which was a smoking lounge with couches and places to sit.  We sat for a while only to be approached by a guy who wanted us to guess his nationality.  Really? Is that all you got? He was nicely dressed I’ll give him that, and when he asked if he could sit down, I smack myself now for allowing it as he tried to sit on my lap.  His stay was short lived since he was spitting on me as he spoke about being an Egyptian and living in the palace.  See we think quick, we go with a plan, and when he asked us for our names it went like this: “Valerie, Jane, and I’m Married, thanks but we have to go find our friends.” Yup…at least that part was the truth. 

From bad pickup lines such as ‘would you dance with those Chippendale Dancers?’ to horrible music this night couldn’t have gotten any worse for our eyes and ears.  We encountered at the next bar a girl bent over puking at her table with her friend holding her hair back,  someone else with her boyfriend wearing prison stripes that if she didn’t pull her skirt down a bit more we would be able to tell what brand of panties she was or wasn’t wearing.  Apparently we missed the memo that prison stripes were the rage now since I could count on both hands the amount of people wearing them, and that includes the amount of men in Salmon colored shirts, oh and don’t forget the guy wearing the pink pants.  Whether they wore them well is a different story.  And would someone please tell these girls to keep their shoes on when they use the public restroom?  How gross!  I wonder if the girl we saw in the lobby, who looked like she was tossed out of her room with her bag did.  She was sitting on the floor in the middle of the lobby, on her phone when we heard in a half-crying-upset voice , “You left me in the bathroom for 3 hours!”  HAHA!  I was amazed how many people asked us if she was okay out of concern, my response, “She’s not in our party, not our problem”. She clearly had a phone so she could find her way home or better yet, call her parents to come get her.  I guess if you were hitting on my boyfriend I would have left you there too.

Amongst the ridiculous amount of bachelorette parties that we passed and our  ‘Congratulations, don’t let her eat the cake’ remarks to the bachelor parties (although no one seems to understand that, but we warned them) we had fun laughing at all those women dressed up to the nines who can’t walk in their shoes.  Yes we’re laughing at you because we know better.   We also laugh at men who sit together (and take pictures of them), men who sit together with a chair in between  them (huh?),  men who look like Hermie the Dentist that order Bloody Mary’s at 4 in the afternoon.  

Last but not least I’d like to give a shout out to the girl, who I mistakenly assumed was a teenage boy, for checking us out and to “Jimmie Walker” who kept calling us beautiful.  Thank you!

Every year it gets better, every year we have fun, there’s always a new story, someone else missing a spot with SPF,  a new ‘idiot’ to make the blog and the hope that one of the angels would get inked to join the rest of us.  An annual trip that we all look forward to that just might be split in seasons…look out winter and next summers ‘party’ is already planned!