At first you thought that this photo was repetitive and not worth including...and then you looked again and noticed Fatty's ridiculous expression in the background and suddenly everything made sense.
Here's Chris and Fatty back at my apartment getting ready to head back to their respective homes - so ends our journey.
Between the three of us that had cameras, we managed to take just over 2,000 pictures which I edited down to 21 entries comprised of exactly 790 photos. And so it's with these last few words that I end the European Vacation Series (which is by far, the longest diary project I've ever undertaken). Back to life in NYC!
Here's another one. This one's my pensive and artsy "I'm acting like the camera's not there, but clearly I must know it is because I'm the one who took the picture" picture. Who's more emo than me? Motherfuck this photo diary nonsense, I'm gonna get me a LiveJournal. (ps - look at the two cutey patooties passed out next to me like little sleeping lambs. Teeheehee.)
Awww, yeah - check tha setup! Awwww, look how cute Grant's mom is all displaying the food with the boys. (And be forewarned, anybody making remarks about Moms in the comments section will be promptly banned. In the words, of the Wise Fatty, "Dat shit ain' coo'!")
...we arrived safely and without incident (save a slight yelling match between Grant and the rest of the passengers in the car who politely asked him if he would "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN SO DON'T HYDROPLANE OFF THE ROAD AND DIE FOR FUCK'S SAKE!") at Grant's parent's home and celebrated with some stiff drinks...
Being that we were leaving Crete in the morning to head back to the UK, we decided to take one more trip into Rethymnon to walk around and get some ice cream.
Not completely happy with the shaky, hand-held quality of the previous "Scootering" footage we'd shot a few days earlier, Chris strapped the camera to the back of my bike so we could film our mountainous ascent on the coastal backroads. (I'll get around to posting clips of this someday. Don't worry, with the exception of Grant trying to brain we while I'm squatting down and talking to the bike-mounted cam, you're really not missing much).
After fucking around for too long in Bali, we ended up having to make the 35 minute trip back to our condo at dusk (freezing our asses off the whole way). After dropping the bikes off and picking up our car, we headed to a nearby restaurant for an early dinner.
...I claimed I wanted to get a picture of these three on their way down, but it was really just my sneaky was of getting them to go first in case there were any ScoobyDoo-esque villians waiting below.
We saddled back up on our HOGGZ and hit the road. We only managed to get about 1/4 mile when Grant, who was leading the pack, slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road hysterically laughing and pointing...
Here's Fatty, Grant and Chris upon arrival - quasi-drunk from dinner and already in awe of the stupid amounts of hot Greek women. (Make sure to look at all three of their priceless expressions).
Looky, looky! What's going on here in this picture? After Grant was done giving her the "See, aren't we fun guys?" photo review, she quickly cozied up to tha Grizza.
With the leather-panted Gunther giving us the stinkeye from across the table we took a view pictures more pics without her in the background to try to throw him off our perv trail. By the way, ever notice how stuff like Coke, ketchup and McDonalds always taste not-so-great overseas? Well with beer, it works the other way around. The beer we are drinking is Amstel. (not Amstel light, regular Amstel) Maybe it was the crisp sea breeze or the abundance of badobnkadonk butts out there but it was hands down one of the best beers I've ever had.
And then a group shot. HA HA HA HA. Notice in the background you can see the chick's equally-attractive German boyfriend totally catching on to what we were up too. Das gig ist up, ja?
The camera never lies. That's why the picture is blurred. But turn down a complimentary digestif in Greece and you might get your ass handed to you along with the check. Looks like we have some shots to drink. Oh well, here's to minimal liver damage.
Where we proceeded to throw down group beach coldlamps, awww yeah. Check out all the rocks on the beach. The waves there made the craziest sound. Each time the water washed out back towards to ocean, it would drag all of the smaller rocks across the larger rocks on the bottom and make this bizarre, underwater rumbling noise. After a quick swim, we laid down to dry off in the sun and were all quickly lulled to sleep by the sound of the water.
Here's us bright and early out on our front porch enjoying a breakfast of Greek yogurt and granola. Mmmmmmmm. (ps - what's up, busted dudes in the morning?)
...he brought out more white wine. Amidst all the merriment (shit-talking and recalled moments of scooter-glory), we suddenly realized that we were all completely shit-hammered. When we (slurringly) asked him, "Kostassssch, why are we schooooo drunk?" He explained that the local wines contained approximately 14% alcohol. (Which explains why these pics are starting to get as blurry as our vision was).
How tough is the Fatty in this pic? See that drop off behind Fatty in the pic? That's actually a steep road that leads down to this little tiny part of the penninsula that goes out into the water. We drove down to explore and take a closer look.
I don't know if you know this, but Greeks drive like crazy people. Wait, that doesn't quite do it justice. More like FUH-HUH-HUH-KING CAH-RAZY PEOPLE! It makes no sense. You walk around Crete and all you see are these chilled out playas all taking it easy, sipping their coffee, taking their four-hour breaks...but all of a sudden, put one of them chilled dudes behind the wheel of a anything with a motor and all of the sudden they've GOT FUCKING PLACES TO BE SO MOVE OR BE KILLED! With that in mind, full-well knowing that renting scooters on a Greek island might lead to an early death, we decided to head to the restaurant across the street and enjoy what might very well be our last meal:
Live Show gets the thumbsdown! Here's us in the parking lot trying to assess the financial damage. Our four Russian "strippers" managed to fleece the four of us for a grand total of €120 in less than 20 minutes! And we still didn't manage to see any heines! We hopped in the car to drive the remaing 1/4 mile back to our resort, and in the moment of silence after we were finished laughing hysterically at what had just happened we all heard Grant say quietly to himself: "Hmmmmm. A hundred Euros, eh?" Hahahahaha.
On the way back to the car a little after 3am, we found another sidewalk snack shop and decided to get something to eat. We all ended up ordering the Cretan equivalent of (my favorite bo-bo NYC food) the infamous Rosario's "Frankie and Cheese." (special shout out to the Crowley brothers, Dens & J Crowley, who have both frequently use their web pages to expound upon the most excellent deliciousness of this culinary wonder of the Lower East Side)
Here we are, four dudes surrounded by nothing but totally hot women from a Greek island who want to have NOTHING TO DO WITH US. Liberia's got nothing on us, THIS is hell on earth.
Being that all the road signs were in Greek, we elected Chris to drive. We packed up the car, busted out the map, and started the 80 kilometer drive from Heraklion to Rethymnon.
London being London, it started raining just a few minutes after we got off the tube. We looked around for umbrellas and these were the only ones we could find. "Haaaaaaaaaaaay!"
Reunited! Grant had been in LA working on a TV show and we hadn't seen him in about a month. He arrived in London in the morning and woke our asses up. We showered, got dressed, and headed around the corner to a "builder's diner" right around the corner from her flat and we all ordered...
After dinner, we stayed in Soho and upon Charlene's suggestion, decided to see if we could talk our way into the Kingly Club (which is this private, uber-exclusive, membership-only club that had only opened a few days ago). The rest of the group hung back and Charlene and I headed for the door to attempt to crash the club.
So in the course of shooting the shit with Tony Chambers, it came up that we had wanted to sing karaoke that night but that the only place that we knew of had already closed. Tony leaned in close and in a conspirital tone told us about a private, karaoke speakeasy he knew of that operated afterhours on the second floor of a tiny, nearby sushi bar. After promising we'd keep it secret, he disclosed to us the location. (Looking back, he was probably just totally psyched to have our loud, American, clearly NOT VIP-asses out of his little private, members only backroom!)
After a nap and some tea, we all met up later that night for pre-dinner drinks at a bar called The Social. L to R: Grant, Danni, Chris, Kate (I think), Layla, Fatty, Charlene and Grant Morris.
7:54pm: We arrived at Heathrow totally cracked out. We were so tired that we decided that we were going to tell Charlene that we were up for maybe grabbing one drink but then after that we needed to get some sleep.
(Time Elapsed With Only 15 minutes of Sleep: 28h 24m)
10:45am: When we had driven into Reykjavik earlier that morning the darkness had hidden the alieness of the Icelandic countryside. In the daylight, it was absolutely breathtaking. Rocky fields made up of lava rock covered in electric green moss stretched in all directions. We were so blown away that we eventually decided to pull over and take some pictures.
(Time Elapsed With No Sleep: 20h 15m).
After the museum, Smari remembered that he'd only put a few minutes of time in the meter back at the Tjorn, because he'd only been planning on being there for a few minutes. So we all headed back to the Tjorn.
I should also at this point tell you all that we carried Fatty's rad little MiniDV video camera with us throughout the entire trip and we ended up shooting just over 14 hours of tape (which I'm in the process of editing into a full-length video diary). Over the next few months I'll be posting some of the choice clips from it. Woo.
8:02am (yep, still dark). We made it to downtown Reykjavik (the world's northernmost capital) and parked our teeny-tiny Eurocar in a public lot near the Tjörn, which is a big, man-made lake in the center of the oldest part of town.
We didn't manage to get a picture of him, but on the walk over to the Tjörn, this thirty-something year-old guy, who had what looked like a giant lobotomy scar running horizontally across his forehead, ran up to us and said "Where are you from?" in perfect English. "New York City," we told him. "Oh, yeah? What do you do?" Me: "I work at a software company." He then leaned in really close towards my face and asked, "A SOFTware company, or a softWARE company?" Then cackled maniacally and ran away.
Miraculously, he managed to avoid getting a ticket (but he did accidentally lock himself out of the car...Doh!). We thanked him for the tour (it's still one of the nicest things a stranger has ever done for me - so Smari, if you read this, thanks again!) and then told him that we were thinking about checking out the Blue Lagoon on the way back to catch our flight but that the lady at the rental car place had seemed underwhelmed when we asked her about it. Smari told us "Fuck that lady. If there's only one thing you could see in Iceland, it should be the Blue Lagoon. Don't miss it. Go there now." That settled it. We bid Smari farewell, and headed for Grindavik.
After we got our money all squared away, we headed over to Hertz and rented a car. We told the woman at the counter that we only had a few hours and we asked her if, besides Reykjavik, there was anything that we should be sure not to miss in the short time we had. She was like "Eh, not really." So we were like, "What about that Blue Lagoon place? We saw video about it on the plane and it looked amazing! Is that worth checking out?" Once again we were met with a tepid "Eh, it's ok" and a shrug. (We wrote off her lethargy as an effect of the less than four hours of sunshine Iceland receives during its winter days).
7:25am: Lost. We were right on target until the highway we were on turned into this crazy-ass rotary that shot us off in the wrong direction. We stopped at a gas station for directions, but nobody there spoke enough English to be helpful - so we hunkered down with the map and tried to figure it out. (Check out Fatty's priceless "We're lost" expression).
6:40am (local time and still pitch black out). We spent the hour-long drive into Reykjavik betting on what time the sun would rise. Price Is Right rules in effect: the one who managed to come closest, without going over would be declared the winner. It was then agreed upon that the winner would get to make out with Gemma, Grant's hot little sister, (mmmmmm....Gemma) when we stopped at Grant's parent's house in Essex on the last leg of our trip. But then we all remembered that Gemma had a boyfriend. (Booooo).
Before getting in the cab, we neurotically checked to make sure we had our passports with us for the 11th time. You know, just in case one of us had somehow managed to loose it on the 25ft trek from Fatty's apartment to the street.
Saturday night Grant made reservations for the Über-fancy restaurant, Suba. The food was so pretty, that our entries all merritted us all posing with them.
I edited together this montage of some choice cuts of the hits from the evening. (My favorite moment is Fatty's expression at 3:20) Enjoy! Track listing:
1. Christmas Wrapping
2. I Can't Go for That
3. Christmas Wrapping (part 2)
4. Head Over Heels
5. Plush
6. Peace on Earth / Ziggy Stardust
7. Let's Go
8. Fairytale Of New York
9. Creep
10. Don't You Want Me
11. Do They Know It's Christmas?