Drinking Puerto Vallarta, Day V

Generally speaking, a bad hangover is like having dog shit stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I can’t recall exactly how I got it, it’s annoying and it won’t go away easily. Through careful planning, it can be avoided; it’s through with reckless behavior that I end up with it, and it takes great dedication, devotion and determination to get rid of it.

But for some reason, the hangovers in Puerto Vallarta seemed to dissipate like the morning haze over the ocean. It simply burns off as the day warms up. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to figure it out. I’m afraid I’ll jinx it or something.

Wednesday morning was much like the other mornings on this vacation. We sat around by the pool, Jackie complained about the other guests “reserving” their chairs, and we consumed drink after drink after drink.

The Sharaton Buganvilias Resort sells its rooms as time shares. The reason we got our rooms so cheap was because one of the fractional owners couldn’t use it and auctioned it off. The big thing on this particular day, is the resort was holding a huge “owners reception” for all the time share guests. It was to take place at 5:00 PM and we weren’t invited.

Throughout the day, we kept hearing people talk about the reception. It sounded like it would be a great party with unlimited drinks and a pretty good size buffet. We heard stories about how fun this party is and about a raffle where everyone ends up winning some sort of gift and how nobody would miss it for the world.

So Jackie and I started making plans to crash the party. It was scheduled to start at 5:00 PM, but our plan was to wait until it really got going before we would try to sneak in.

At 5:30, we headed down without a very well-formed plan to gain entrance. We saw that an entire lawn area that overlooked the beach was roped off with a stage on the far end, a half dozen food stations, a large bar, and hundreds of chairs and little tables set up throughout the area. The guests were dressed fairly nice. The men were all wearing long pants and the ladies were wearing nice summer dresses. There were no shorts, baseball hats or flip-flops at this party. Until we showed up.

We managed to gain access by walking along the beach and coming up from behind the  

stage. Nobody questioned us and nobody seemed to care. Pretty cool. We walked across the lawn towards the bar without any hassle. Very cool. We ordered a couple of drinks. No problem. But wait…. “Sir, Madam, do you have your name tags?” a little Mexican man was running up to us. Oh shit. “No, not yet,” replied Jackie, “we just got here.”

“No problem,” said the little man, “I’ll go get them for you.” And off he went towards the sign-in table.

“Oh, fuck. What do we do?” I asked Jackie.

Within fifteen seconds he returned with two blank name tags and a Sharpie.

That’s all it takes? Great security system they have there. But, that’s all it took. With the help of two little sticky pieces of paper and a Sharpie, we were now cleared to drink all of their booze and eat all of their food.

So we got to work on it.