And what a birthday it was!

So we make it into Scottsdale, AZ on Friday night and pull into the cul de sac (that's right, I said cul de sac) of Mr. John Mineiri and his lovely wife Nancy. We are greeted with a sign in their front garden reading "Reality Time-out Bus Parking" in true Mineiri fashion. Everyone should know that we often call Mr. John Mineiri "John MacGyver" because he is just that...a superhuman who can run up mountains and fix our leaky bus with duct tape and a match. Anyway, Rob was looking forward to going on a hike with Mr. MacGyver and then hitting the Scottsdale bars more than he was looking forward to his new Brianna Banks video. So at the crack of dawn (or ass crack of dawn as Jerone usually says) we woke up to embark up Tom's Thumb...it's not what it sounds like...Tom's Thumb is a mountain in the outskirts of Scottsdale. As Mr. MacGyver ran up the mountain, we attempted to keep up and successfully made it to the summit. Taking in a gorgeous view for 10 minutes at the summit and with no water breaks on the way up or down, the 4 of us destroyed the Thumb. We tried to go to a cool water-park afterwards, but it was closed...so Mr. Mineiri took us to the next best thing: Dos Gringos Bar. We did a midday barcrawl, and due to our dehydration from climbing a mountain, we were a bit drunk to say the least by 3pm. We returned to the Mineiri's to power nap, and woke up to sizzling steaks and mashed potatoes. After rejuvenating ourselves with food, we attempted to rally for the night out.
Starting with a redbull vodka, we began the birthday fest at a cool club known as six (or nine upside down). We began a new pubcrawl and hit about 4 places before returning to six. Yah, I don't remember much else, but I do have a spectacular image of Abhi doing his headshake breaking-neck-dance and, once again, getting the hottest girl in the club to dance with him. Waking up was, for lack of a better word, excruciating, but we were able to get up in time to go inner-tubing (or inter-tubing as Jerone usually says) once again. We headed out to the Salt River for our second tubing adventure of the trip. We packed our cooler full of beers (and cantaloupe?...Abhi's idea, go figure) and headed down the 2 hour long journey. We ran into a bunch of different characters, but my favorite one was the lady who asked Abhi if he had ever seen the movie Harold and Kumar. We all kind of looked at each other open jawed to see if she was taking it where we thought she was...and she did. She followed up this statement with a number of inappropriate black jokes which made us more puzzled at where she came from. Regardless, we had a blast tubing and headed up to Sedona to visit another one of Rob's family friends with a daughter...ahem.
Sedona was gorgeous and we really just walked around town, getting cool gifts for people and followed it up with a beautiful hike down to a river for swimming. The water was cool and the mountains were breathtakingly striking with the sunset's reflection on the already flame-red rock...that was the most ridiculous sounding sentence I could've written, but you get it...it was beautiful. We ate like kings with the DePasquales (Rob's family friends) and headed out that night to the grandest canyon of them all: The Grand Canyon. That's it for now, but a preview of things to come: We're in VEGAS!!!
-The Cap