The New Year's Eve Classic

I had a pretty good vacation. How's 'bout you? The chicks I nanny go away for Christmas so I have a good two weeks off every year for the holiday season. The last few years have been so busy with splitting our time up between family parties and events that I haven't had the chance to plan anything out of town during my Christmas vacation in quite awhile. But Matt and I DID manage to head up to Buffalo, NY for New Year's Eve and The Winter Classic on New Year's Day with our friends Mark and Mary. The best thing about Mark and Mary is how laid back they are. We could change our plans at the drop of a hat and they'd be all for it. I wish I were more like that.

New Year's Eve was fun. We took a detour on the way to Buffalo and stopped off at the Seneca Allegany Casino in Salamanca, NY. It was like the casino in Erie, but much prettier. It didn't look like they took a week to build it and they had these fancy things called escalators. I lost 10 of my 40 dollars in one hour. Uh, that part sucked but the rest was nice. Then we headed off to our hotel in Hamburg, NY to eat and pretend to be locals with my huge camera around my neck.

We drove around and around Hamburg after getting turned away at the most popular restaurant in Hamburg. If we didn't have Mark's GPS, we would have been eating the free Chex Mix from the hotel for our fancy New Year's Eve dinner. I named the GPS woman Annabelle because she sounded beautiful and led us to the best rip off of Dave and Buster's I've seen: The Warehouse. It was a really nice bar/restaurant with 1/4 of the establishment being an arcade with basketball, airhockey, videogames, etc. We stayed for awhile, our food was awesome (and was really TWO dinners) but our waitress sucked. How someone gets a "rum and diet" mixed up with a "tequila and diet" is beyond me but for some reason I was punished the entire night for calling her out on it. No matter!

Then Annabelle led us to The Pourhouse! It was really fun and we felt very welcomed. They were giving out free NYE stuff so we decided to ring it in there. One of the greatest parts was when I offered to buy the first round and tried to pay with my credit card. The bartender (who didn't get one order wrong, even throwing four complicated drinks at her all at once!) said I'd have to start a tab because it's a 10 dollar minimum to charge. FOUR drinks and I wasn't even near 10 bucks. So great! In fact, my entire tab that night was only 20.50! The four of us ended up back in our hotel room for a champange toast and off to bed. No partner swapping, porn scene ensued.

We got up for The Winter Classic. It was freezing but awesome and really, once in a lifetime experience. I'm so glad we went. The Penguins won and the Sabres fans were so pissed, they set a dumpster on fire. Getting out of the parking lot was ridiculous. It took two hours to move from our parking spot. Thankfully, it was five minutes from our parking spot to the highway. Plus, we had our leftovers from The Warehouse in the trunk...or we would have died. The weather on the way home was horrendous and I was scared for my life, but we made it...and it was all worth it.