San Diego + Holiday = Insanity

Sometimes I forget that I live in a city that most people view as a vacation spot. Then, a holiday rolls around and I'm reminded with a resounding (and by "resounding," I mean 3 million people coming into town) yes!

For some reason, sunshine, warm weather, beautiful beaches, beautiful women...and ME, attract hoards of people on any three day weekend (Go Figure). In light of the alcohol-beach ban, I thought this year would be a little more tame...I was wrong. The only difference was that instead of everyone being so intensely concentrated on the beach, the antics were a little more widespread.

Somehow though, in the last two years of living in San Diego, I've managed to miss the bulk of the craziness. I happened to move here just before Independence Day of 2006. That year, a few of us went down to the beach to see what all of the commotion was about. After driving around for ages to find a parking spot, we finally disembarked and walked....and walked....and walked for ages. I had no idea where to go or what to do since I had lived here for all of two days. My tour guides, San Diego locals Brent, and Jeff (whom I've made famous by exposing his multiple blunders on this blog), took us on a freakin marathon walk of like seven miles (yes, the definition of a "marathon walk" in flip flops in my book is precisely seven miles) as I watched all of the beach goers partying while we wonderingly passed by. We ended going home at a nice reasonable hour.

Last year was an improvement. But I still went home at a reasonable hour.

This year was even better. First, I get an invite to a "Red, White, and Blue" Pub Crawl.

I love Pub Crawls. They always attract a fun and rowdy crowd, you get to meet lots of people, and best of all, the party starts early! Furthermore, this particular crawl was at Pacific Beach aka the heart of Independence Day chaos...just where I want to be.

I had invited a bunch of people to come along, but at some point, these other groups started straggling and were not keeping up with the crawl. At one point, I was running between three different bars to hang out with my different friends, all the while just saying "be right back!" and disappearing for minutes at a time. I don't think anyone was aware I was bouncing in and out all over the place!

Evening came and I went downtown for Darren's little house warming for his new downtown apartment. As expected, there was a definite hodge-podge of people that showed up including Danny's three very Mexican cousins.

Define Irony: How about 3 very drunk Mexican guys walking down the street belting out the Star Spangled Banner in thick Latino accents as the fireworks are going off. Hilarious.

Later, back at Darren's, the party ramped up again. At one point, this girl was doing her "sexy-dance" near me. I was giving her a hard time telling her she didn't know how to "get low." Of course, she decided to prove me wrong:

"What!? Just stand here and watch me Drop it Like it's hot!"

As she was "gettin low," all of a sudden she went crashing to the ground!

"Ah! My knee just gave out!"

Part of me wanted to say I told you so (but I'm not that much of a bastard). This was incredibly awkward since I've never seen anyone go down like that, especially while trying to dance "sexy like" (is it bad that I'm laughing as I write this?). Darren helped her to his bed to rest while her girlfriend who is also her trainer, iced her knee and stretched her out.

Apparently "seductive dancing" is a hazardous activity. Either way, I took this as a cue to depart. "Ummm...good luck with the knee and uhhh, yea just dance with more caution."

Next year, I'll be better off just staying at the beach. At least there if someones knee goes out while trying be sexy, they have the sand to cushion their fall rather than the unforgiving, and resounding hard wood floor.