June 5, 2004

Today is Nate’s bachelour party. I slept in late and got up and ready just in time to learn that everyone had decided to go to Tahou’s for lunch so I hit the road. I beat everyone there because Bob missed his exit off of the thruway and had to come up 390 and then we were running late enough that we had to drive back down south to the airport to pick up the rental car. Well, this turns into another story about the incompetence of Hertz. Most of you probably know the story from years ago when Josh tried to rent a car from them and instead of just telling him that they didn’t like him and weren’t going to rent him a car they made up some ridiculous excuse that they didn’t accept credit cards issued by banks. Now, at this point everyone should reach into their wallets and pull out all of their credit cards (yes, even Discover and Amex) and look around to see what bank issued them. In fact, in the retail trade, Visa and Mastercard are collectively known as Bank Cards. Well, Hertz had a sign saying that they took Visa, Mastercard and Amex but then claimed not to take any (Amex is issued by Centurian Bank, in case you never looked.) So, because I couldn’t believe their audacity and capacity to believe in our naivete, I turned to someone who had just rented a car and asked to see his credit card. Of course, it was issued by a bank, what were the chances? Anyway, it ended up in quite and argument with Hertz never being able to explain why they were being so prejudice nor why they were unwilling to honor their merchant’s agreements with their credit card companies (if you display a sign for a credit card, you must take it.) So anyway, it turned out that this time, Hertz had rented Bob a car from a rental location that didn’t allow the public to enter. It was a rental location inside of a private airport. But they don’t inform you of that when you rent the car. You show up and they don’t let you in and your car is just in there mocking you. Luckily, we didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking for the place. Eventually, Bob managed to wrangle a Chevy Suburban from another Hertz location at the real airport.

After that fiasco, we were on our way back to Tahou’s for that lunch. We were all pretty hungry by this point. We ate quickly and then drove over to Irondequoit to Durand-Eastman Park for some golf. They have recently redone some of the course – Josh, Phil and I played there three years ago. There were seven of us but just six golfing so we played three on three scramble. It was fun and we ended up dividing the teams very well because the teams ended up tying! That was a lot of fun. We were pressed for time, however, so we wrapped up quickly and drove up to Joe’s house in Greece to change and get everyone together for some paintball. Joe is the only one of us who has ever played previously so we figured that this would be pretty interesting.

We played paintball for almost three hours in the basement of Rochester’s old Cumberland Street post office. That was a load of fun. We were all really soar afterwards, except Joe. Joe never even got shot once. The rest of us were all relatively even in how poorly we did. I think that a lot of us will be looking forward to playing again sometime soon. That really is a neat sport. If any of us do it much, though, we will want to get our own face masks because the ones that they have there really suck. They are gross, they smell and they fog up really easily which makes you blind in the dark basement.

After all the sports, we headed out to Alexander Street to do some drinking. I am on lamisil for the next month so I can’t drink. Alexander Street was having their festival so the place was crazy. It was so packed that it wasn’t very pleasent being there at all. We decided that we needed to go someplace better so we drove up to Charlotte to go to the Pelican’s Nest, or something like that. Andy and I headed home after the bars closed, we both have busy days tomorrow and need some rest. Most everyone else crashed at Joe’s house and were just starting to watch Eurotrip when we left.

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