You did What to a Goat?! Getting’ Down at Playas, Record Breaking “Lengths” and Embarrassing More Family and Friends

After the excitement of “Taylorpalooza” at Auburn, we got a late start out of Alabama Thursday morning. And if you’ve been following our blog thus far, you already know the drill with our ability to judge distances- we told Lori’s cousin Willie at UNC that we’d be in Chapel Hill around 6pm. Psych! After navigating through Atlanta and the Carolina’s we rolled in somewhere around 10pm.

An exciting weekend, a big night in New Orleans, the party at Auburn and a long drive would not stop us from making the most of another night in a new place, especially with the knowledge that we were back east and our journey would be concluding in a mere two days.

After classy drinks on a rooftop bar with cousin Willie, he departed for an obligatory event with his frat’s pledges and we hit the town to continue the night. We wanted to go dancing, our favorite late-night pastime, and, to continue the classy kickoff to the night Willie had suggested a bar called “Playas.” Given our directional abilities, we did not find Playas and ended up at the end of the line of bars at a spot with hip-hop pumping and co-eds grinding. Left only to dance with each other, we grabbed drinks and hit the dance floor unashamed. After a few dances however, we decided the bartenders were the hottest catches in the bar and the music and crowd inhibited our getting to know them better. “On to Playas!” we decided.

We finally found it, and it was quite the scene. Again, we were the only two girls that hadn’t arrived with male dance partners, and since we were rocking the “I-just-spend-the-entire-day-in-a-stuffy-car-without-washing-or-even-brushing-my-hair-before-I-left-look” and were the only ones without short skirts and high heels it looked like it would stay that way. Not to be daunted, we got right to the middle of the stage and if nothing else, provided some entertainment for the paired up onlookers.

The night ended at what was supposed to be another “classy bar” where we sipped our nightcaps antisocially in the corner and, for whatever reason, spend the better part of half an hour fixated on the various shoe choices of the boys at the bar.

Willie kindly picked us up at last call and we enjoyed an amusing slumber party conversation that included joking about the rights of passage in a frat (think the uptight Omegas in Animal House on initiation night), speculation over the size of a certain male appendage among Tar Heel athletes and whether they might break the Guinness Book of World Records (when we checked the book the next day we discovered that it is PG-rated and therefore omits such categories), and realized it was a good thing no one had asked our names at any bar or on any dance floor in town because had we admitted that we were Willie’s guests we may have embarrassed him beyond social repair.

San Pedro's... No Wait, We Mean Pat Obrien's

As we drove out of New Orleans on Tuesday morning Lizzy asked “What was that place called, San Pedro’s?” referring to the piano bar we’d visited the night before. “I think it was called Pat O’Brien’s?” Lori thought aloud, checking to see if she still had the napkin from the bar, which had the recipe to their delicious, and deceptively strong Hurricanes written on it. Yea, it was Pat O’Brien’s, only like, the most famous bar in the French Quarter. Forgive us our cultural confusion, we were hadn’t yet recovered from the daze Austin City Limits had left on us, and we’d been spending a lot of time almost south of the border recently.

Thanks to the great company of Meg, Willie, and Mellow, we spent Monday night in the French Quarter, hanging out in Meg’s amazing apartment and seeing the best of what Monday night in New Orleans had to offer. Which was, eating gumbo, having the amazing discovery that open containers are totally okay on the streets of the French Quarter, dancing on Bourbon Street, seeing topless women, and almost getting Lori to do karaoke… New Orleans kept us up and up, pushing back any slump the post-Austin weekend could have otherwise imposed on us.

We Left Our Hearts...

Welcome to San Fransisco! It’s no wonder Tony Bennett left his heart there- we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog with the water below and the city before us and felt like we were on a movie set. Once we’d bid farewell to our moms we headed to sunny Pacific Heights to see Linnea, our hostess with the very mostest. We entered her beautiful apartment to find not only the one thing we were really looking for in San Fran (her) but typed itineraries of a perfect weekend in the city.

After making dinner, we hit “the Mission” where Linnea, our classy city girl, had checked out the best bars in the area. Coincidentally, one of the bars happened to be celebrating Slovakia with music and a performance. Too cheap to pay for the show, we opted for the bar downstairs to rub elbows with Linnea’s cute and employed friends. Maybe there was a job opening? Somewhere?

Though we were slowly getting over our fear of strangers, our mothers, having been with us for the past 72-plus hours, were close in mind. On the initial drive west, we had discussed who we could safely talk to after learning that by our mothers’ estimations most of the people we would encounter on the journey would be psychotic killers. We like to meet people and traveling the country would give us that chance, but who could we safely talk to? Then it came to us- gay couples. If they were in happy relationships, not interested in the female sex, and as stylish and friendly as we were willing to stereotype them to be (we also watch a lot of Kathy Griffin) they were definitely our “men to befriend.”

To Lizzy’s joy, she thought she spotted such a pair that night. The safe, “gay” couple turned out to either just be playing the gay game to get girls or they couldn’t help how very metrosexually European they were. What seemed like the chance to make a set of lasting friends that we could look cool with and start a coast to coast friendship with turned out to be one big headache for the rest of the night as we stayed on constant watch to keep Lizzy away from the lovesick, forty- something year old Slovakian man who kept “bumping” into her all evening.

The rest of San Francisco was awesome, from the next morning at the farmer’s market where we met the coolest bee keeper on the west coast, to the aquarium where we visited the rain forest simulation, saw beautiful fish, got a hankering to see a shark in the wild, got uncomfortably close to a stuffed version of the bear that almost killed us mere days ago, and had lunch across the courtyard at the de Young. After broken farrow and Blue Bottle coffee for breakfast the next morning on the pier we bid farewell to lovely Linnea and headed down the coast to Big Sur for a night.