All I knew was that I wasn’t allowed to plan anything for Thursday. All they told me was that I would be busy.

Instructed to be at the train station at 9:40 in the morning (after a lousy four hour sleep), I dragged my sleepy self downtown and was greeted by Derek – one of my two Best Men for the wedding. He handed me a train ticket and we hopped on the next train down the coast. Destination: Port Aventura.

Giddily running from China to Polynesia to Mexico to the Wild West, Derek and I managed to go on just about every ride in the entire park. We even went on some more than once. Highlights? I’d have to start with Derek’s pink head scarf. That thing was great. Close behind in second place would have to be the rides. Roller coasters-a-plenty along with some soaking wet log flumes and a 35-story deadly free fall that made Derek scream like a little girl.

click to enlarge the pink head scarf

The best roller coaster was definitely the Stampede. It’s one of those old rickety wooden ones that give the impression that it could fall apart at any second. I like that. The best part of this one was that you could choose if you wanted to ride the red cars or the blue cars. Then, the two race to see which finishes first! We chose the red one because I believe that red is a naturally faster color than blue. And I was right! We kicked blue’s ass. We rode it again to see if we could win in the blue cars. I am sorry to say our efforts were not enough to make the blue cars win and thus finished with a 1-1 record (or a .500 winning percentage).

Just as one exits each major ride, there is a little hut set up where they try to sell you obscenely expensive snapshots of you on the ride that you just enjoyed. You’re supposed to see yourself screaming on the little monitor and then fork over the cash. Instead, I just took a picture of each of the monitors with my digital camera. This method ended up being much cheaper and it made me feel sneakily proud of my ingenuity.

click to enlarge the stolen souvenirs

After along hard day of screaming and laughing, we headed back to Barcelona where we met up with nine more of my mates at a lovely restaurant down in Barceloneta. Very tasty seafood at a fancy restaurant on the beach with good friends paying the bill – who could ask for more? Bob almost calculated the bill correctly, too! Then we finished up with some drinks around the block at a too-hip-for-its-own-good bar called Sahara. No strippers, no drugs, no drunken shenanigans. I think we can attribute this lack of delinquency to the fact that Ed (my other Best Man) was out of town for the week. He’s back now and is threatening to throw me a post-wedding bachelor party to make up for it. If he asks, you haven’t seen me.