Last Friday, St. Patricks Day, I drove down to Savannah, GA to meet up with some friends for a long weekend of golf, poker and fishing.  You know you’re middle-aged when the prospect of having to tool around town in a mini-van (my marvelous Mazda MPV) didn’t scare anyone off.

I arrived at the Savannah airport at the appointed time, 6:30, only to find out that the flight was delayed.  Five hours later they arrived, but it wasn’t so bad because I got to watch some meaningless NCAA game in the Phillips Seafood bar while the score showing my alma mater George Mason beating Michigan State in the first round of the NCAA tournament appeared in the corner of the screen.  First victory ever in the NCAA’s for GMU, yippee!

The guys landed and I had a cooler of beer in the back of the van for them.  I labeled the very large cooler "Mike’s Beer" and the small cooler "Jon, Kevin, Dave and Karl’s Beer".  Mike does love his Bud Light.  An hour later we were at Dave’s house in Hilton Head (Port Royal) playing our first hold ’em mini-tournament.  Then it was off to bed so we could get some decent shuteye before our 8:30 tee time.  That was the second sign that we’re getting old; we actually slept between poker and golf.

After golf (very ugly for all involved except Dave who won 7 skins) it was back to the house to get cleaned up and head to Savannah for a night on a casino boat.  Silly us for cleaning up since the clientele was, uh, interesting.  First bad sign, literally, was the sign at the gangplank that said "Absolutely no concealed weapons allowed" quickly followed by a guy scanning everyone with a handheld detector.  Next bad sign was the overwhelming smell that was suspiciously like the worst fraternity houses I’ve visited.  Then we came across the first patrons decked out in bling that didn’t deserve the second bling to qualify for bling-bling and we were a little scared.

The boat’s air conditioner wasn’t working so within minutes sitting in the card room was like taking a sauna with 400 chain-smokers.  Things got a little better when the boat left the dock and hit the open water, but that’s because about 30 people instantly became nauseous and headed for the open-air upper deck.  We all entered a $100 no-limit hold-em tournament and were doing pretty well, especially since most of the other patrons apparently thought watching one night of poker on ESPN qualified as experience. And I’d say most of them didn’t get past third grade math. 

So what happened?  Well I got knocked out by a guy with two teeth who called my all-in (I had A-Q and my ace was paired up on the board) while holding a J-9 and then caught a gut-shot straight on the river. That’s poker though, and honestly I took out someone with a lucky card myself so I can’t say much.  Still we all were getting taken out by rednecks with horseshoes surgically implanted in their derriers.  Kevin was doing great until the conditions got to him and he went all in on a horrible hand, but that was because he felt so sick he could barely see straight.  Mike ended up finishing in the money (6th place) so it wasn’t a total failure.

Then we were stuck for four hours until the boat went back to shore.  In those four hours we were able to witness the fine spectacle of society’s Wal-Mart crowd getting increasingly drunk and rowdy.  Some guy called his wife a bitch and they started to have it out.  Then a white guy called his black friend the "n" word, which his friend seemed fine with but a woman from a black family sitting next to them took great exception to and a spat broke out between her family and his crowd. 

I escaped to the upper deck for some fresh air, but that didn’t last once the karaoke started.  An old, drunk redneck named Steve went up and requested some Credence Clearwater Revival and the DJ spent a minute finding it while Steve returned to his seat.  When the DJ announced "And now we’ll have Steve singing (I don’t remember what he requested)" Steve looked up and yelled "What the f— you talking about?" The DJ said, "Sir, you requested the song and you get to sing along with it."  Steve said, "I don’t wanna f—ing sing it I wanna listen to it."  The DJ told him that there wouldn’t be any words because the Karaoke version only includes the instrumentals since you’re supposed to sing along to it.  Steve asked him "What kind of f—ing DJ are you?" and the DJ just gave up.  When no one else requested a song the DJ put on a top-40 loop and when Steve heard words I thought he might fight the DJ for "lying to him about not having no goddamn words in the f—ing songs."  That’s when I got the hell out of there.

Thankfully we were back on land at 1 a.m.  We drove back to Hilton Head and then crashed.  The next morning, Sunday, we got up played some poker and then at noon took a fishing charter that Dave had set up.  It was probably 50 degrees with a 15-20 MPH wind blowing and we froze our butts off.  The captain didn’t want to but convinced him to try going to a spot offshore, and after weathering five-foot waves for 1/2 hour we saw his wisdom and had him take us back into the sound. We managed to catch four fish that had a cumulative weight of about four ounces, but I had the best time because my college roommate, Bobby, called me on my cell to do a play-by-play of the last 13 seconds of GMU’s win over Carolina in the NCAAs.  I might have jumped off the boat if my knees hadn’t locked into place hours earlier.

We got back to the house about six on Sunday and everyone took hot showers to try and warm up.  We ordered pizza and then played hours of poker…probably the highlight of the weekend.  Kevin and Mike played another round of golf Monday morning but the rest of us slept in and packed to leave.  That afternoon I dropped them off at the airport and had a great time driving home, laughing my ass off the whole way.  I kept thinking about five middle-aged guys driving around in a mini-van trying to cut loose and hitting every snag you can imagine.  It was a blast.