Last night I went out to celebrate my friend Aaron's birthday. He just turned 30 and his wife, Kelly, had planned a big, secret shindig. The plan was to have everyone meet at the Redstone American Grill in Eden Prairie for dinner at 7:45pm. Then after dinner we would all jump in a limo for a bit of bar hopping. As always, the plan sounded good.
The first hitch in my plans for the night came just after I left the house. My ever tolerant wife, Sue, called me to let me know that the treadmill we had purchased last weekend would be delivered between 8:30am and 10:30am Saturday morning. Damn, I had thought they told us we could choose AM or PM for delivery, but apparently not. With my luck these guys would show up at 8:30 on the dot.
When I arrived at Redstone, I met up with some of the others that had been invited. When Aaron arrived, he was quite surprised. He had been expecting to just have dinner with Kelly.
The cast of characters for the night included: Aaron & Kelly (of course); Mike, Mark, Tyson, Scott, and Quan (and his wife Tao) from Aaron's work; Jessica, Hillary, Todd, and Craig (friends of Kelly); and of course myself.
Before dinner started Aaron opened the gift I had picked up for him. I warned him not to take it too seriously, it was chosen as a bit of a joke. However he liked it and told me he was going to actually put it up in his office. We'll see.
At 9:45 the limo was good to go and we all piled in, with the exception of Todd and Craig. This was the second surprise of the night for Aaron, as we hadn't said anything during dinner about the rest of the evenings plans. As soon as the limo started rolling, Scott broke out a bottle of Jose Cuervo for shots, everyone had one except for me. This is attributable to my complete distaste for tequila following an incident from my freshman year in college. That's all I am going to say about that.
First stop for the night was Chino Latino in Uptown for a round of mojitos. The place was packed! A lot of people like Chino, Sue especially, but I am just not fond of it. I am really not into anyplace that has roasted guinea pig on the menu I guess. After we were done at Chino, Tyson bailed for the night, which was a bit of a shock. I thought he would be in for a night of diehard imbibing, but I guess not. From there, we headed to Cuzzy's. Quite the contrast from Chino, crowd wise. By this time though everyone in the party was pretty well bagged, except for Mark and myself...the two oldest guys in the group. We had a round of kamikaze's that were especially good. I also had a Stoli raspberry with cranberry juice which I found to be quite tasty.
We waited at Cuzzy's for the arrival of Anwar (another of Aaron's coworkers) who had just gotten back from Cleveland and joined the party straight from the airport.
Our next stop was Mario's Keller at the Gasthof in Northeast Minneapolis. At this point it was about 12:30am and I was now about two miles from home. I was thinking about the delivery in the morning and contemplated calling it a night. I should have called a cab and gone home, but I thought this would be our last stop and so I stuck it out. In the Keller, most of the group, the women especially went, dancing. Aaron was given a "Boot" of beer that was ungodly huge to drink.
From Mario's we headed back downtown to some dance club, I didn't quite hear the name. Spent another half hour there and then called it a night. We waited for Hillary's boyfriend to come and pick her up, then we headed back to Cuzzy's so Anwar could pick up his car. Finally, we headed back to Eden Prairie. Most of the group had planned on staying at a hotel near Redstone. Having only had two drinks early in the night, I was completely sober and drove home. I crawled into bed at 4:00am and set my alarm for 8:00am. My last thoughts for the night were, "Those damn delivery guys better get here right away so I can go back to bed" and "I'm getting too old for this sh@#!".
