jibber jabber 

took a little tour de west van on saturday and stopped by lighthouse park for a little wander around. i was most amused by the people with hiking boots, backpacks and trekking poles. like seriously people this isn’t the west coast trail here, its a goddamn park with some walking trails you could do in your armani suit and dress shoes. sheesh.

i was however a little disappointed that the seals and otters had found somewhere else to play. guess i can’t blame them when you got chawch’s in their cigarette boats buzzing the shore every 5 minutes. go crockett, there’s some coke waiting for you on a table back on shore.

not quite but it was pretty bad. at least the flight on the way down was exciting. this one was just plain annoying. some little baby started screaming his head off about 1 hour into a 3 hour flight and didn’t stop. combine that with another kid behind me that enjoyed stomping his feet. now normally i would have freaked out on the kid nicely asked him to stop, but he had down’s syndrome so i just had to clench my teeth and suffer through.

if you look closely at the picture you’ll see this really weird phenomenon where the AC on the plane is all steamy and blowing around the cabin.

the closing night party was held at an amazing restaurant. just outside of cabo on a rock bluff overlooking the ocean. we arrived right at sunset so there were many photo ops.

and i now know the secret on how to kill a party. prior to dinner everybody was ready and primed to go out for the evening and do some serious liver damage. after dinner 99% of the crew returned to the hotel. how? why?

the restaurant because of its beautiful location, relied on sea breezes to keep the restaurant cool. there was no breeze. hence 200 people in a fanless, air-condition-less restaurant in the middle of mexico. it had to be at least 40 degrees in there. combine that with rich food and everybody was done.

we tried to rally back at the hotel pool but were shut down when they decided to dump large bags of cleaning chemicals into a pool filled with 50 some odd burton-ites. oh well.

but not in the traditional sense. i mean my liver’s out of shape. big group dinner over at cabo wabo last night.

sammy hagar is a freak. luckily he wasn’t there but not that you’d know given the amount of pictures, paraphenalia and video in that joint.

so back one topic, you just know that there’s going to be trouble when its 3 hours of open bar for the Burton crew. and hence why i’m out of shape. like a typical rookie i blew my load early and got drunk way too fast.

not sure when or even how i made it back to the hotel. i do know that i had one mighty vomit session though. luckily i got to sleep it off until noon followed up by four hours of floating in the pool before resuming drinking.

and therein lies the dilemna. drink more to keep the liver in shape or give up drinking.

a funny aside: taking out my contacts at night is so ingrained in me that i do it no matter how drunk i am. well this time i managed to faithfully take out my contacts, fill up the container and close it up. unfortunately the contacts never made it into the container. they were sitting nicely on the counter in front of the now closed container. oops. luckily i had a spare set.

it turned out that we missed it all…including the party…boohoo. i’m a little bummed cause it sounded really fun.

apparently beach umbrellas were turned into lawn darts, while hurricane force winds drove rain horizontally through the open air lobby. the funny part was that it arrived quite suddenly and unannounced.

one story i was told involved the activity MC on the microphone calling out “who wants to play volleyball” as people were running for their lives and even as the staff started pushing people aside to make their own way the shelter, the MC announced “don’t panic…it’s just a little rain”

oh and props to the NW rep, sasha for saving a little boys life.

we managed to grab some grub at the buffet before the restaurants shut down for the evening and consumed some quality “beast meat” [sic] and we missed the opening party in which some 15 bottles of tequilla were consumed. booo

so it turned out to be a two hour delay before we got off the ground and it turned out not to be a hurricane, rather the first named tropical storm of the season.

the first attempt at landing, felt like a stone skipping across the lake before we aborted about 20 ft from the tarmac. the second attempt we only got about 200 ft from the tarmac before calling it off.

we then proceeded to the closest “safe” airport, manzanillo, to refuel. now manzanillo has got to be in my top 3 most amazing airports. the runway runs parallel to the beach and the beach is literally right off the tip of the wing. its crazy. coming in watching the surf break on a beautiful deserted beach.

now manzanillo is not a busy airport. its pretty much shut down most of the day and only opens up for scheduled flights. well our flight was obviously unscheduled so they weren’t really prepared for us. nothing’s open, not that there’s much there, so we’re all herded into a small waiting area outside the terminal to kill time while they refuel and figure out what to do.

after about an hour, we reboard and head back for another attempt at landing in cabo. a little bumpy but we finally made it….seven hours behind schedule and nobody on the plane has eaten in about 10 hours.