Labor Day in So Cal

Now that I have finally recovered from my recent trips, I can start blogging about them. 

One of my good friends moved down to LA not too long before our wedding and since we had to pay for said wedding and honeymoon, I haven't gotten a chance to go down and visit her.  She has since met someone and they now reside together in Manhattan Beach.  With all of the great deals on Southwest, I snagged a decently priced ticket and headed down there for Labor Day weekend with another friend of ours and left JB at home.

Since it was also the upcoming birthday of the friend I was heading down there with, Steph and her BF made some plans for us which involved driving down to San Diego on Saturday.  After they picked us up from the airport on Friday night, we headed to a nearby bar where their friend, Dane, was playing an acoustic set.  I have a video of him between songs just messing around, but he was pretty awesome.  I love, love, LOVE acoustic sets!



That's Steph trying to creep into the video.  If you can see in the mirror, there was a girl in red and black flannel that was getting down on the dance floor.  A friend of Dane's, supposedly.  She was dying to get us to dance with her and was apparently a rep for Red Bull so in order to keep us out there with her, she kept buying us rounds of drinks.  Works for me!

Later that night we went back to Steph and Kris's apartment which is right on the harbor in Marina Del Rey.  We had to take this cutey-patooty for a walk, so we ventured out to the pier:


Meet Chester (Newfie/corgi mix)

We were almost at the end of our walk when we heard snoring coming from the docks.  There was a mountain of either seals or sea lions (how do you know the difference?) sleeping on the dock.  When we approached with Chester, the alpha male started barking at us.  So naturally, I took some video.  You can't really see anything, but our drunk commentary made me laugh:



A pic of us on our evening walk:


Apparently I didn't get the PJ memo before the walk

The next morning we headed down to SD, but not before we had ice cream cake to celebrate Maren's birthday. 
 

Wish I could wake up to this every day!



Given the fun the night before, we didn't get the early start we were hoping for and it took us 3 hours instead of 2 to get down to SD due to holiday traffic.  We had some road sodas (and a designated driver) with us though, no worries.


And Chester!!

We made a brief stop at the apartment we were staying at to change real quick and then headed off to a house party right on Ocean Front Drive.

Gotta get the booze from the car to the house without getting busted

 

Don't all of your house parties overlook the beach with a DJ in the living room?

One of my favorite morments of the trip:

 

And the award for Best Lover goes to....

Shortly after this we all headed downstairs to the patio for the sunset:

And then proceeded to go home and get ready for a night out at Hard Rock:

That was a late night with a lot of drinks, which led to brunch the next morning looking something like this:

After brunch we headed to Coronado for a day at the beach (which may or may not have included 6 bottles of champagne) some delicious Mexican food, and another night at Hard Rock.  However, I don't have pictures of any of that. 

We ended up staying up all night since Kris had to work his bartending job in SD and we planned to head back to LA as soon as he got off work.  We hit the road at 5am and pulled into their apartment complex, full sunrise, at 7am.  We slept for a few hours and then headed out for brunch/lunch in Venice Beach before heading to the airport.  I'm pretty sure my liver still hasn't forgiven me for what I did that weekend.  At least it was good prep for my Vegas trip.

Up next, Vegas Bachelorette!!!