Twelve Hours in a City Recap 3 from nathan m peracciny on Vimeo.

One of our biggest fans and supporters; Nate Perraciny cut down some of our footage, taped a brief intro in Buffalo with Clark (Joe now lives in Austin, Texas) and mashed it up into this awesome recap.

Thanks Nate!
- Clark and Joe

We arrived in San Diego around 7pm and were greeted at the airport by our driver for the night. We packed into the Suburban provided to us by La Costa Limousine and headed over to our friend Savi’s house, where we planned on staying.

By the time we got there and started planning out the night it was clear to us that a Suburban was just not going to cut it. What happens next is why I love my life. Walk out to the limo driver ask him if we can get a bigger car, now mind you we’re not paying for anything, he tells me “Not a problem, I’ll be back in an hour.” This is customer service. Amazing.

So when the new limo arrives we pack in and head to a place called Side Bar. This is probably the most bumping club in San Diego this night, line is around the block, idiots at the door paying $100 just to cut the line and get it.

We’re having none of this nonsense. We walk up to the bouncer tell them who we are and that we’d love to tell everyone how great the place is. The rope is opened and we walk right in. That’s just how this whole trip has been. One awesome experience after another. So Side Bar is packed to the gills but it’s actually surprisingly reasonable to drink in (beers were $5).

After being classy we decided it was time to skeez it up a little and headed to a place called “The Tavern at the Beach.” Talk about an interesting group of people. Every girl in there looked like a stripper in training. Literally. It was like shooting fish in a barrel with a fucking MOAB. Really wonderful stuff. Of course the staff at the bar loved us and took care of our tab for the night. We headed back to Savi’s house to catch some sleep.

We woke up at 8am to our driver arriving for the day. La Costa decided to send us off in style and provided us with a STRETCH ESCALADE for the day.

Upon discovery of this massive ride we decided it was time to partake in some cliff diving. We roll up to the cliffs, get out and eye up the situation. Only Savi, Clark and Joe were man enough to leap the 30 feet into the Pacific. Talk about a great way to wake up, caffeine can’t touch cliff diving.

Once we were sufficiently amped up we took a ride into Old Town to get some AUTHENTIC Mexican food. This restaurant was literally on the Mexican border and you could taste it in the food. To make things better there was a 80 year old Mariachi walking around the place playing music. Real Huevos Rancheros rule. Check out the pics:

San Diego is an absolute beautiful city and Old Town is a really remarkable little place. It’s definitely on our list of places to come back to.

Now it was time to head to Salt Lake City to hang out with some JetBlue staffers. See ya there!

We’ve been having such a wild time on this journey we were super excited to have a what we expected to be a pretty chill night in Tampa, FL. We met up with our host for the night, Sam, at the airport and took a quick ride over to his place to shower and charge up our phones.

Sam, a friend of our friend Marty from home, fit in with the crew perfectly. Young, wild and ready to party from the word “go”.

Our first stop was a cool hockey pub called Hattrick’s (Get it?). We went there for the $1.50 drafts and 25 cent wings, but we ended up getting so much more. Sitting at the bar enjoying what were actually pretty good Buffalo Wings there suddenly appeared a mildly intoxicated Cougar next to us. Since it’s our job to be social and talkative we immediately started a conversation with her. Well one thing led to another (doesn’t it always) and she ends up telling us that her hot daughter is a WWE Diva. Of course our ears perked up right away, we had to meet up.

Normally when talking to a girl’s mom you have to be respectful and at least pretend like you’re not totally interested in hooking up with her daughter. Then maybe, just maybe she’ll ask for your number and with any luck the daughter will call you and you take it from there. NOT THIS TIME. Mother dearest just gives us her daughters number sends her a text saying “You have to meet up with these guys” and boom! We’re gonna chill with a WWE Diva in a couple hours.

Obviously excited to be body slammed by a hot chick we head back to Sam’s to get ready for what hopefully doesn’t end up being rest night. After getting pretty we headed out to meet up with this Diva.

She didn’t disappoint. I’m pretty sure she fell in love with Clark, which is nice for him. You know a chick is serious when she orders Tequila straight up. It’s always exciting to learn about other people’s crazy occupations, like professional wrestling. She had some pretty wild stories and loved telling them, great personality to make it in the WWE.

We decided it was time to head to a bar with some AC so we went to “The Rack.” Now this is an interesting place, 1 level but 5 different rooms each with their own bar and each getting incrementally more “classy”, starting with a room filled with pool tables and ultimately culminating in a sushi bar room. Very cool. The other interesting thing about this bar is it was PACKED with 10’s. Like 4 deep at every bar, just tons of hot babes. It was wonderful.

Tampa, unlike a place like South Beach, is actually really reasonable to hang out in. While it’s just as douchey as Miami the fact that you can get sub $4 drinks and 25 cent wings really makes it a nice place to visit. The downside is it’s not a central city at all. Everything is a 10 minute cab ride away so if you don’t have transport the cost savings drinking could get offset pretty easy if you move around a lot.

After a reasonable amount of time out we headed home to get classy for San Diego. See ya there!

After a short ride from the Airport into Old Sacramento, we pulled up to the Delta King hotel. Now this is no normal hotel, it’s a retired steam paddle boat. Upon arrival I had the strong urge to find a lounge, light up a cigar and start playing poker with Maverick and the gang.

Clark just got himself a Blackberry and hasn’t quite mastered changing timezones with it yet. What does this mean? It means he starts kicking me violently at 2:30 am trying to convince me it’s 5:30 in the morning and the TV crew is waiting for us. Oh, it also means he called the producer at 2:30 in the morning to see where she was. Turns out she was in bed sleeping. Neither her nor I were amused.

Eventually 5:30 am did in fact roll around and it was actually time to get up. We wandered down to the front of the hotel and the phrase “blown away” doesn’t begin to describe our reaction to what we walked into: Full TV crew, live feed van, and a massive limo bus. For three dudes. That’s right, three guys, one limo party bus. That’s how we roll.

After a quick meet and greet with Mark S. Allen from CW31 in Sacramento, and Chris Quinn, the owner of Corporate Transport Solutions, it was time to do our first live shot. I nailed it like the natural I am. No nerves, I looked beautiful and I pronounced my own name correctly. Clearly, a star is born.

During our live teaser spot, as we call it in the industry, we were informed that the CW set up a little adventure for us. Clark and I were going to go on something called “the Screamer,” which is basically this long post with two seats at the end that spins around and tries to scare the crap out of you. Sounds like a blast. So off we went.

Now, when you’re about to experience some crazy g-forces in all sorts of directions, it’s always a good idea to stop by Denny’s for a quick breakfast. So that’s exactly what we did. If you’ve never had a Grand Slam Wrap (yeah, wrap)—don’t. It’s one of the most awful things I’ve ever eaten. Take a grand slam (eggs, sausage, pancakes, syrup, biscuit) and put it in a tortilla. Yeah there was syrup in the tortilla. Gross.

At this point, my stomach was already not loving me for downing what had to be a minimum of 2,000 calories of the most processed, unhealthy food on the planet. Whenever my body decides I’m doing something bad to it, I just have to up the punishment level so it knows not to act up in the future. Obviously in this scenario it meant strapping into the Screamer and seeing if the ride operators could assist me in refunding the Grand Slam Wrap that was slowly digesting. Check the video, it really shouldn’t be called the “Screamer” as much as it should be called the “Giggle Machine” because that’s really all that happened. It was a good time. (Video on its way.)

After Clark and I regained our balance and stopped sounding like 13 year old girls meeting John Mayer, we got in the party bus and headed to do our first Live studio segment (watch it here, here and here).

This was totally a trip. It was our first time in a green room, our first time on a studio set (that was really, really impressive), and my first time dealing with multiple cameras to look into.

The best part about being us right now (aside from limo rides everywhere, free hotel rooms and being showered in free drinks) is meeting people who have careers we’d kill for and all they do is tell us how awesome we are and how much they want to be us. Today we heard this from about half a dozen news anchors and reporters, so that ruled.

Mark told us to head to Mecca Club after Good Day Sacramento and have a couple pitchers on him. This sounded like a fantastic idea and that’s precisely what we did. Upon arrival at Mecca it was clear that this was our kind of place. I mean, it was 11:30 in the morning and the bar was packed and the majority of patrons had clearly been drinking for awhile. The beer at Mecca was probably the coldest I’ve ever drank, and after a hard day being on television there’s nothing better than a cold, cold beer.

Since there’s not a ton of stuff to do in Sacramento during the day, we figured now would be a good chance to hit up a college campus and check out the local chapter of TKE (Clark’s Fraternity). On our way to UC Davis we stopped by Vince’s for what we were told are the best steak sandwiches anywhere. TOTALLY FALSE INFORMATION. These things aren’t even in the same class as the Pink’s steak sandwich. I mean, I hesitate to call it a steak sandwich, that’s how insulting it is to compare the culinary masterpiece from the Pink to this impostor.

After meeting up with some of Clark’s brothers and teaching college kids some lessons we’ve learned in life, we all felt it was time for a nice relaxing swim. We took a quick trip over to a brother’s apartment and relaxed for a few hours before heading to the airport for yet another flight.

Sacramento was a fun city and being on Good Day Sacramento was an amazing experience.

See ya in Tampa, kids!

When we arrived in Austin we were greeted by Evan from Delaware North (the company that pretty much runs all the retail and food in airports nationwide) he was kind enough to take us out to lunch at The Salt Lick in the Austin airport. Food was AMAZING, try the brisket..no seriously try it, but make sure you leave room for the most loaded baked potatoe I’ve ever seen in my life because you’re going to want to sample that, trust me.

After a welcome but extended stay at the Austin airport we were scheduled to meet up with our host for the night Mr. Dan Northcutt (goes by Northcutt, because he’s rad like that). Now when we first met Northcutt he emailed us telling us of his hot-dog restaurant suggesting we hit it up to grab some hot dogs and cold beers (interestingly enough that’s both their slogan and website (www.hotdogscoldbeers.com) now when someone tells you that they own a hot dog joint you’re not really expecting much. To be honest I thought we were getting picked up by a Texas hick in a pickup with a rocking mullet. I’VE SINCE LEARNED NOT TO JUDGE A BOOK BY IT’S INTRO EMAIL.

Northcutt couldn’t have been more awesome if I invented him for the purpose of this project. Dude was on point. Just amazing. Picked us up took us to one of many business ventures of his, Frank. Frank isn’t just a hotdog shop. OH NO. It’s a GOURMET hog dog shop, a bar, a chill lounge (located on the 2nd floor for the nights when you just wanna sit back sip some whiskey and relax) and bodega. YEAH THAT’S RIGHT A NEW YORK CITY STYLE BOGEDA. IN A BAR. That’s how cool this guy is, he can put a bodega in his bar and get away with it and still pack the place every night.

So we’re at Frank, chilling, trying to plan out the evening, couple beers mixed with a couple shots of Jameson just figuring out where we can shower when in walks Taylor the man behind Austin’s Restaurant Week and coolest new mag Rare Austin (www.rareaustin.com). Taylor tells us he has this membership to a Men’s Club called the Metropolitan Club and he’s set us up with some showers and a bar tab (people just love taking care of us it’s mind blowing). Of course we take him up on his offer and head over there immediately as a shower and beer is exactly what we were looking for at that moment.

When I say that Austin continually surprised me is a gross understatement of what that city actually gave back to me on a consistent basis. We walk into the “Member’s Only” room and WOW. Steam room, showers with 7 plus shower heads, just about every men’s grooming product you could imagine and oh yeah waiter service bringing us cold beers in the biggest goblets you’ve ever seen.

I had to indulge in a quick (1 hour is quick right?) steam before I moved into the shower to allow the 7 different shower heads to further indulge me in extreme luxury. After the showers everyone moved on to the grooming stage of extravagance. Gold Bond, hair products, hot shave cream, the works. We were truly living the life of trust-fund playboys, just without the douchiness of being raised complete pricks..it’s what we call a true win-win.

Post most-amazing-shower-in-the-world we headed into the Lounge area to charge up our gear and sip on some goblets of beer. After getting sufficiently distracted by the amazing situation we found ourselves in, Northcutt calls to tell us to get our asses back to Frank so we can get this night started (by night I mean 5 in the afternoon). So off we went.

When we got back to Frank, Northcutt had his whole crew waiting for us. Among them was Stuart who gave us a quick rundown on the huge growth that Austin has been experiencing. He also happens to have a SUPER hot girl friend who owns a high end cupcake shop down the street from Frank called Delish (www.delish-cupcakes.com). Yeah, we went and got our cupcake on.

We all walked down to La Condesa which served up some really unique and delightful apps. We had sushi on a tortilla, some mini brisket burritos and REALLY REALLY good margaritas. The tab? Just shy of $300 and covered, because we’re apparently really fun to hang out with (thanks again guys!). Apparently people in Texas eat a lot more than us folks from New York because after that we went back to Frank for some platters of their amazing hot dogs. When I say amazing I really mean knock your socks off good hot-dogs. These ain’t your run of the mill street meat dogs. I’m talking Chicago style with the greenest relish you’ve ever seen and onions so sweet you swear they were made of sugar. I mean NY Style Sausage that is so authentic you’d swear you heard a cabbie cursing in the background.

So now it was officially time to “Keep Austin Weird” (the city slogan, really could a more perfect city exist?). Our first stop was the Dizzy Rooster where they had a candle light tribute to Patrick Swazye (apparently when you bounce here you have to watch Roadhouse as a training video). After that we headed over to St. Cecilia’s to class it up a bit. While enjoying martinis and margaritas we met up with the guys from English Teeth (www.myspace.com/englishteethmusic) who gave us a track to use for the Austin b-roll video.

We’ll talk again in San Francisco!

We’ve been looking forward to our Orlando trip for a little while now but all of our expectations proved to be way too low. The people of the Kissimmee visitors center took such good care of us it’s literally raised the bar to a whole new level.

Orlando is one of our shortest stays at only 7 hours so we had to pack a lot of action into a shorter day than usual. Chris, our host, picked us up from the airport and we headed out to the Boggy Creek Airboat Ride center. Loaded the crew on to what I was calling, incorrectly as it turns out, a fan boat and took off in search of gators and cool fan controlled maneuvers on open water. Unfortunately we weren’t able to see any crocodiles but we did do some pretty cool slides and 360’s. Overall a very satisfying little adventure.

In combination with the airboat ride is a small gator after show. Normally just another tourist trap kinda event, but not today. Today they let Steve wear the gator as a hat. The problem with this is that if you push on a Gator’s stomach, they have a tendency to urinate.. This particular gator released its’ bladder ALL OVER STEVE’S HEAD & NECK. It was absolutely hilarious!

Once Steve cleaned off as much natural Gatorade as he could, the crew headed out to the city of Kissimmee to grab some eats at the Broadway Pizza Bar. Steve, Joe & Clark dug into Calzones (pretty good, don’t hold a candle to Pizza Plant Pods though) while Jeremy mowed down a sandwich and some italian wedding soup.

In order to make our 6:40 pm flight to Burlington we had to be at the airport around 5. Finishing lunch at 2:00 you’d think we wouldn’t have enough time to do anything too awesome. If you thought that, YOU WOULD BE HORRIBLY MISTAKEN. This is the beginning of what might be the most epic 2 and a half hours of the trip yet.

Now we head to GATORLAND. We met up with our park guide, Mike Hileman, and the hardcore shenanigans began. First up on the VIP tour, feeding the gators. Now when someone tells you that you’re going to be feeding some alligators you assume you’ll be throwing food over a fence or something safe like that. Not here kids. Here you walk right up to them (I’m talking 3 feet max distance) and toss them some raw chicken. AWESOME. What’s not awesome is when you’re taking a group shot 3 feet in front of about 12 huge gators and your guide screams “RUN!” followed by extreme laughter as you’re darting to safety.

The fun is just beginning at this point. It was time to head to check out WHITE ALLIGATORS. Yeah, white ones (Don’t call them Albino, they have blue eyes) and we got to take their picture. There are only 14 of them in the world and we had the rare change to photograph them up close and personal. Our guide really wanted to show us his favorite gator Chester so we obliged him. You remember Chester from the news a few years ago, he ate 3 dogs in his neighborhood. He’s about 13 feet long, 1,000 lbs. and 3,000 lbs/sq inch of dog eating, jaw crushing ability. It was super intense.

When someone turns to you and asks “Hey, would you like to wrestle an alligator?” The only answer that comes to mind is “Yes!”. Gatorland has a twice daily gator wrestling show (that’s very funny, exciting and an overall great time) where real professionals handle these million year old killing machines. When the show was over and the spectators left our show began. We went into the sandy cage and approached our beast. I was first up. “Just climb on his back and put your hands on his neck” our guide explained. I complied. Then he spoke words that I’ll never really forget. “Ok now don’t lose” at that point he yells at the gator and starts hitting him in the tail, you know– to get him good and pissed off. I’m struggling trying to contain the beast as it’s slowly dragging me to the killing waters where 10 of his friends waited to dine on my Jameson marinated flesh. The order came out “Alright, jump off and pull him back by the tail.” I tried and after really setting my footing was able to drag the animal back several feet. This story repeated itself for Jeremy, Steve, and Clark. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience.

Just when we thought we were about to leave, they pulled us back in for the Gator Jump show. During this show they dangle meat above the gator pool and the gators jump out several feet to grab their grub.

As 4:45 rolled around we decided it was time to head to the airport as we had a 5:00pm TV interview to record.

Joe and Clark had to jump off the L for a quick interview with Mancow, just in time to get harassed by some transit police while speaking on a national broadcast. Then they received a text message from Clark’s fraternity brother, congratulating him on the mention on the Howard Stern Show. The crew was extatic to find out that Robin plugged the site (So if you are a Howard Fan – Like we are; Welcome to the project!). The team made their way to Joe’s friend Bina’s pad for a quick shower and “the hair of the dog” before heading for The Willis Tower!

The folks at SkyDeck Chicago (@SkyDeck) were nice enough to give us the tour of The Willis Tower and let us roam around “103″ taking in the beautiful view of the city.

Then the guys headed to Giordano’s for some of their famous deepdish pizza. It took about 40 minutes to make, but it was well worth the wait. Everyone agreed that it was the best chicago-style pizza that they had ever had.

Finally, the dudes had to head back to Ohare to catch their flight to LGB. Some locals gave us the wrong directions, if it hadn’t been for Joe’s diligence in map reading, we would have missed our flight. Luckily, we caught the “Mo Betta Blues” piloted by Capt. Tony and FO Sean and crewed by Sabrina, Lorri, and Curt, gave us an excellent flight to Long Beach.

We’ll be partying in Downtown Huntington Beach tonight, come meet up with us!

To see the rest of the images from today’s part of the journey check out Clark’s photostream on flickr.

Boston Skyline

We then proceeded to catch a bite to eat at the “No Name Restaurant” on the pier next to the World Trade Center. Clark had a delicious bowl of seafood chowder, Joe went for the fried scrod, Jeremy had some fried shrimp, and Steve tried broiled Halibut for the first time… and he liked it! We had a pleasant experience at this hidden gem and we enjoyed the Boston accent of our server and the visual of eating besides the boats that had made the catch that we were enjoying.

Seafood Chowder

The gang then found their way to a Dunkin Donuts that had Wi-Fi, we took about an hour off to catch up on media relations and plan some of our future tour stops. After that we proceeded into the city center and found a park that was littered with sleeping white-collar workers. We took another little break and enjoyed the fountain while “Wheezing the juice” on some municipal power (Sorry Boston Tax Payers, It’s hard keeping smartphones, cameras, laptops, and batteries charged while on the run).

Office Worker Sleeping in a Park

At this point we were pleasantly surprised by an e-mail from @dunkindonuts inviting us to watch the Red Sox game from the Dunkin Donuts box at Fenway Park! So we packed up and headed to Fenway for the game, where we witnessed the Sox trouncing the Orioles.

Fenway Park at Sunset

We were surprised again when they gave us gift bags full of shwag. Which we had to ask our host to drop-ship back to Buffalo for us since we don’t have any room in our bags.

Dunkin Donuts Gear

After the game, we headed back to the center of Boston to check out some of the bars in the historical district. We met up with Ben (@tangon) and he took us to the oldest bar in the United States which happened to be having a Karaoke night. Joe, Jeremy, and Steve, finished their night there. Clark and Ben split to Cambridge and stumbled upon one of the coolest clubs in Boston. It had Live DJs spinning Hip Hop and R&B and live VJs mixing up 80s-90s video footage. It was packed to the walls with hipsters and BBoys/BGirls breakin and shakin.

Unfortunately, time flies when you’re having fun and all too soon it was time to hop a cab to Logan and catch some sleep before our 7:55am flight to Chicago.

To see the rest of the images from today’s part of the journey check out Clark’s photostream on flickr.