Well, a road trip with the “4 Guys” might be good for the spirit but it completely flies in the face of the healthy lifestyle I have adapted myself with (Winston Churchill would love that sentence). Truthfully, you could probably say it is a method of reinforcement to return to healthy living when you get home, and a means of questioning how you ever lived through university. I now know why all the Privateers who got off the boat 200 years ago looked all pale and sickly... they were living on chicken wings and grog when they landed in Halifax!
It would be a fair statement to say that Achmed enjoyed his first road trip with “The 4 Guys”: Matt, Jason, Todd and Kevin, and equally fair to say that if what we did was blow off steam then Mount St. Helen had a mild form of gas back in the 80s. (those of you who don’t know what I am talking about are probably too young to keep reading after this paragraph.)
For those of you who follow this to monitor my health, I can tell you that I have blown all of the cobwebs out of my head... and I am hoping by sometime next week to be able to think clearly again... or at least see clearly again. As far as stress relief goes, mentally I am at the top of my game right now; as for cognitive performance and physical stamina, I am hoping to be in proper working order again by Thursday morning, that is when I bring Achmed to the hospital to get his portrait taken and see how well he is developing.
For those of you who only read this blog to break up your day, (I expect this is going to be at least 2 or 3 parts)... I have a little story to tell you about 4 guys and a rock-and-roll band! (Someone should write a song with that title)
Day One (Thursday): The 4 Guys actually started off as two separate pairs of friends who all loved KISS and decided to do a joint venture trip to Halifax to see them. I have never seen the movie “Detroit Rock City” but I imagine that those guys journey to see the “Greatest Band in The World” must have been similar to ours. Jason and Todd were on an early plane to Halifax and Matt and I were on the post-lunch flight, and the two trips could not have started much more differently. The use of text messaging on a road trip has to be one of the greatest-things-ever!
Just to skip the boring details and summarize the key points for the first half of the day:
9:00 – Jason and Todd get to the airport for their 10:00 am flight
9:02 - Jason phones me to see where I am with the tickets
10:00 – Jason and Todd get bumped to the 11:00am flight
11:00 – Jason and Todd finally get on the plane. Jason orders 4 beers instantly and then the attendant ask Todd what he wants… (this multi round ordering would become a theme of the weekend in a few hours)
Noon – Matt picks me up to go to the airport and the first thing he says is not, “hey how are you doing?” but, “Where are the tickets?” (this particular question would also become a reoccurring theme over the next 24 hours)
12:30 – Matt and I check-in at the airport and head to the bar for lunch where we have ONE beer each and a bowl of soup.
12:32 – Matt asks me to text Jason and see where they are (they couldn’t check into the hotel until we showed up)
12:33 – Jason texts me back… “at airport”
12:33.5 – I show text to Matt
12:34 – Matt says, “Are these guys so cheap that they are sitting in the airport until we show up to split the cab?”
Through a few more texts, we find out that their flight got bumped and they were hitching a ride, with a few friends that they met on the plane, to downtown Halifax.
From that point on things went pretty smoothly. Matt and I got to Halifax without incident, grabbed the first cab we saw at the airport when we walked out into the sun and texted Jason to see where we were headed. They two lads had landed at Staynor’s Warf on the Halifax waterfront. I texted back that we were going to check-in and meet them at the restaurant. In theory this all sounded like a solid plan.
By the time Matt and I got to the restaurant, there was a small party happening with some of the local businesspeople and Jason and Todd were hosting it. The hostess couldn’t be happier to see more people join the table. When I told her we were joining “that table over there”, she kind of smiled and said, “oh, you are joining them…” and she waved us by. I didn’t fully understand her expression until Martin and Jane yelled and waved us over to the table, “Hey guys, how are you doing, we have been waiting for you.” For the record, neither I nor Matt had ever met Martin or Jane and as far as we can tell, before lunch that day, neither had Jason and Todd. There were a lot of empty bottles on that table for a lunch. Matt looked at Jenny, our poor waitress, and said, “we will have 2 beers please”… then I said, “I will have two also, looks like we have some catching up to do if these two lads are going to be tolerable.”
I realize that this all sounds kind of boring, but you really need to know how it all started to understand how it all ends. And judging by this post, I think this is probably going to be a 6-part series… because it was probably one of the best road trips in the history of mankind!
From Achmed and Me… Live Life!
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