5000 miles and a bachelor party!

Check out of our hotel and drive straight to the Santa Cruz boardwalk, which, much like the Santa Monica pier, is a huge developed beachfront area with an amusement park, boardwalk, shops and restaurants. We walk around the shops and down the pier then back to the car. It was quite chilly until the sun came out; the ocean breeze is fierce. I crush through an entire bag of freshly made saltwater taffy which was totally worth the diabetes that may result from it. We drive up a very cool twisty highway to San Jose and stop for lunch at In-N-Out Burger (we had to eventually...) which was good as always. Just outside San Francisco we see a NASA research center with massive metallic hangars and some sort of mega structure made of tubular piping. As we hit the edge of San Fran we hit gridlock traffic. At 2 PM! We crawl along in the car until we finally exit near downtown. Fill up with the most expensive gas of the trip (4.49/gallon) then carry on to our hotel. Unload the car fully and Matt takes it to the room while Nick and I drop the car off at Budget. Final mileage count: 5055. No damage, no tickets.

We walk back to the hotel and pop up to the room. Nicest room and hotel by far of the whole trip (and also 2 or 3 times more than any other hotel thus far) and our view of the Union Square area is fantastic. After a celebratory beer, we take the subway to the area where Jamie's (the groom at the wedding we'll be attending Sunday) family rented a house. Headed over there and had beer, KFC, and Pizza while meeting a whole array of people down for the wedding. I remember only a handful of names, but will recognize the people at the wedding now. After the dinner and socializing, the boys walk over to a karaoke bar for the start of the bachelor party. Matt and I get to belt out Bohemian Rhapsody for an appreciative crowd (remember what city we're in) and in our 4th state this trip. The guy running the songs though (a KJ as he called himself; for Karaoke Jockey) was like a soup nazi for karaoke. A song nazi? And would only let you have one song cued up to sing, would give you 3 seconds to get to the stage after calling out the next song (if you didn't make it he skipped to the next person), and would tell the crowd "THAT IS THE ONLY TIME THAT SONG IS BEING SUNG TONIGHT" when popular songs were sung. So after a few of us got to sing a song, we grabbed cabs and headed to the Broadway area of SF. Here we stumbled upon a bar hosting a beer pong night so we headed in and opted instead for flip cup. Went through a lot of beer, as they were $2 each. They sort of shut down for the night so we tried a couple other clubs on the street, but both were sucky, so we grabbed beer and headed to the hotel. Here the group sort of dispersed though, and after a few of us had cheeseburgers, that was the end of the night. Hopefully it was a strange/fun enough night for the groom to enjoy himself.