Friday morning Mat, Ed, Bill and I headed down to Monterey to play a round of golf at Pacific Grove. It’s a little links style muni right on the water and has been called the “poor man’s Pebble Beach”. While the conditions of the course weren’t the greatest with patches of brown and relatively thick fairway grass, the spectacular views and ideal weather (low 70’s and breezy) made for a supremely enjoyable round.

Afterwards we headed back to San Jose where everybody was meeting up for drinks at the Rock Bottom Brewery at the Pruneyard. I invited a few of my California cousins to join us as well. Charlie I had never even met before, Tony I hadn’t seen since high school, and Lily and Nancy I had just seen a couple weeks earlier when they visited NY for Labor Day (and Lily forced me to kill off a whole bottle of Hendricks gin with her in one night, ugh). I only sampled two of Rock Bottom’s beers, the Raccoon Red and the Brown Bear Brown, and thought both were really pleasant with the brown being my favorite because of its more chocolatey finish. When my cousins showed up, I switched to gin and shots of whatever else they bought me. Who knew I had such fun cousins out there. They are totally cool and like to drink and party in a (relatively) healthy way. Even Lily’s boyfriend was chill, not minding my constantly calling him Chaka Khan (there’s no way I could pronounce or remember his actual name, so that was close enough, and I might add, less fobby then calling him char-shu). I hung out with them for a little while before some of them took off to go clubbing at Santana Row while Tony and Charlie stayed with me to work on the remaining pitchers with the wedding party. My old college buddies Sonia and Goose were also on hand, so we all got our drink on.

Afterward things wound down at Rock Bottom we took a drive over to Santana Row to see if we could meet back up with Lily and Nancy at a place called Blowfish, but the line to get in was ridiculously long and the bouncer was clearly a douchebag so we just bailed and headed back to the Pruneyard and played some pool at Campbell Billiards before calling it a night. I must say, that was a pretty full day.