Las Vegas Boulevard, Canal Street, The Miracle Mile, Mamaroneck Avenue. Okay, it’s clear which one of these is not like the others, but we’ve got three weekend game plans that keep things close and cool for your best friend’s last few days as a single man. All prices are for approximately eight people, bachelor included and covered.
The Outdoorsman
ACTIVITIES: Rock climbing, H2 Hummer driving, and white-water rafting, male bonding, shootout…with paint, don’t worry. LODGING: The cabins at State Line Camp Resort COST: $340 per person, plus food.
FRIDAY NIGHT Stay in the county and you have no excuse not to get things going at 5 pm sharp (or noon—wink, wink). How? Climb the obstacle-filled, gravity-defying walls at The Rock Club in New Rochelle or The Cliffs at Valhalla. The former, which was featured on MTV’s life-makeover show, Made, literally rocks: “Fifteen thousand square feet of climbing terrain, walls up to forty feet, and routes over sixty feet.” The latter: 13,000 feet of climbing wall and a super-high rappelling wall to jump down—straight down.
For dinner try Copacabana Steakhouse in Port Chester. The restaurant offers all-you-can-eat beef, pork, chicken, and other meats, some of which decadently are wrapped in bacon. And there’s free sushi and shrimp—as much as you want.
SATURDAY Rock climbing is fine, but we need to head outdoors in manly style. We’re talking a seven-seat, $68,000 H2 Hummer from xoticdreamcars.com. At $500 for the weekend, the whole gang can fit in it (“comfortably seats seven,” Hummer’s website proclaims) and drop-off at your door is included. The destination for your newly rented monster truck? Zoar Outdoors whitewater rafting in Lowell, Massachusetts. Get to the Concord River by 1 pm and raft through “urban whitewater gem plunges over three major class III-IV rapids.” Next, pack your Hummer with food and head to The Cabins at State Line Camp Resort. At $320 off-season and $450 in-season for a weekend in a deluxe cabin, the gang can settle into a fully powered log cottage (plumbing included) with a nearby pool and lake, a free-standing grill, and a fire pit to sit around with a couple of cold ones and s’mores. What, you think you’re too grown up for s’mores? Please.
SUNDAY Get up before 10, and on your way home, stop by Liberty Paintball in Paterson, New York. For approximately $90 a person, you can shoot your friends and get away with it. The area’s only legitimate paintball stop sports 10 fields. Everything you need is available for rental. Groups of 15 to 20 or more (depending on the season) are rewarded with their own field and referee. It’s a blast.
The Sportsman
ACTIVITIES: Root, root, rooting for (or, against) the home team, vroom, vroom, vrooming around a race track, and shoot, shoot, shooting…this time with shells, not at each other. LODGING: One of various lodges near the Orvitz Shooting School COST: $750 and up, but a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
FRIDAY NIGHT Professional sports are great, but at the now sharply reduced price of $1,200, Yankee tickets are probably out of your range (they certainly are out of ours). Heard of the Bridgeport Bluefish or Bridgeport Soundtigers? The former is the easternmost member of the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. For $500, luxury suites can be rented for up to 20 people and, for a little extra, it can be stocked with ballpark food and drinks galore. Single game tickets cost from $7 to $18. As for the Soundtigers: it’s the highest-level minor league affiliate of the New York Islanders. Ten-person suites at the Arena at Harbor Yard, the Tigers’ den, run $625.
For dinner Eat at the park or stop at Bobby V’s Sports Gallery in Stamford, Connecticut, the super sports-centric bar owned by former Mets manager Bobby Valentine. Or, head east to Foxwoods Casino or Mohegan Sun, both of which feature sports betting and poker. What? Of course poker’s a sport; it has its own World Series.
SATURDAY Car racing? You bet. Skip Barber’s Racing School in Lime Rock, Connecticut, is one of only six locations in the country at which motoring enthusiasts can spend an hour at “close to the limit” speeds (that’s 130 mph) in either a Mazda MX-5 race car, or a “Skip Barber” formula car, circling the one-and-a-half-mile, 70-turn, 50-year-old speedway that has hosted both NASCAR and American Le Mans Series races. The $600 training course isn’t cheap, but neither are weddings for 200 guests. Splurge.
SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY If you’ve built up a little road rage after lapping Lime Rock, your next stop will take care of that. Orvis Sandanona Shooting School in Millbrook, New York, is a half-hour’s drive from the track and surrounded by a number of lodges and inns that will make for a perfect Saturday-night respite (yes, some are on the more romantic side—avoid those). One-day shooting school costs almost $600 but is a rare chance to use a gun, if that’s your thing. And fear not, eco-freaks—wild skeet have yet to hit the endangered species list.
The school offers one-hour lessons, which cost $175 and $25 for each additional person, up to a group of four (each additional group would require another $175 charge). Shotgun and shell rentals cost extra. And for those guys who don’t plan to enroll in the NRA anytime soon, the school also holds fly-fishing courses.
The Pleasure Seeker
ACTIVITIES: Stogies, steaks, suds, sensory satisfaction, sand wedges, and sand traps. LODGING: The Ritz COST: Approximately $450, plus food.
FRIDAY NIGHT Okay, so you don’t want to travel and you’re not into the great outdoors. We get ya! So, start your more creature-comfort-focused three-day bender at the NYC Cigar Company in Eastchester. This local stogie-filled hangout owns its own cigar-rolling plants in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, and the atmosphere in the Cigar Company lounge, which can be rented out for private parties, is as cool as the cigars are hot. Four high-def TVs surround soft leather seats, couches, and a poker table.
N’awlins has its Sazerac, Vegas has its 50-cent margaritas, and Westchester, its beer. Lots of beer, in fact, at the best beer garden this side of Oktoberfest: the Lazy Boy Saloon in White Plains. Lazy Boy has hundreds and hundreds of bottles of beer (on the wall…and in the cellar), and dozens more brews on tap. For dinner, we have to insist on steak. May we suggest Frankie and Johnnies in Rye? Or, if you’d like to stay in White Plains, there’s delicious Morton’s.
SATURDAY We still have a hard time suggesting this, but hell, we’re a progressive magazine. Why not pamper yourself at the Ritz Carlton Spa in White Plains? After all, the spa has a “gentleman’s menu.”
Relaxed now? Good. Now how’s about a drink or two at your next stop, the Captain Lawrence Brewery in Pleasantville? Every Saturday, Westchester’s best (and only), brewery leads tours of the factory in which the brews are born. It also sells samples fresh from the kettle.
SUNDAY Burn off some of the calories you’ve racked up playing a round or two at the recently opened Pound Ridge Golf Course, currently No. 2 in the country on GOLF Magazine’s 2008 list of “Best New Courses You Can Play.” For weekend play, it’s $195 per person if booked nine days in advance, and $40 more if booked closer to your tee time than that. The course was designed by Pete Dye, who is in the World Golf Hall of Fame because of his I.M.Pei-esque links-building skills.
Freelance writer W. Dyer Halpern was delighted to learn how many bachelor-party activities the county has to offer.
