After traveling for over 20 hours to get to the Wakeboard World Series stop in Portugal last year, our crew was delirious. To add insult to injury, the airline lost my luggage, so I was stuck with what I was wearing. I was traveling with Brian Grubb, Jeff McKee and Shawn Perry, and our spirits were lifted when we arrived at the site and found a bar on the water hosting a little get-together. We didn’t even check in to our rooms; we just sat down and decided to enjoy ourselves. I was put up with a rider from Spain who was helping to run the event, but I figured he wouldn’t mind if I came in and crashed later on. After an hour or so, we called it quits and decided to alleviate our sleep deprivation with some shut-eye.
The next morning, I was on a later shuttle bus with Shawn and Grubb when Grubb starts telling us about how Jeff was caught sleepwalking naked around the hotel last night. We were in hysterics just thinking about it and couldn’t wait to see Jeff at the site and give him some crap for his late-night mishap. When we got to the lake, I started helping one of the dock-starters untangle a rope. “Ohhh! You are Jeff?” he exclaims to me. “I heard you had a good night last night!”
It took me a second, but I realized he was mixing me up with Jeff McKee. I told him he was thinking about the other Jeff, and how funny it was that he had sleepwalked naked. “That’s not what I heard!” he said back. I didn’t know what to do. I was in shock. Were people already mixing the story up and talking and laughing about me wandering around the hotel in my birthday suit when it was really McKee? The dock-starter told me he heard the story from Andre and pointed him out to me, so I walked over to try to set things straight — and to make sure he knew it was McKee who everyone needs to be making fun of, not me.
Just seconds into talking to Andre, he starts telling me all of these horrible things that I supposedly did with no clothes on — ripping open the hotel room curtains to look out over a huge party in a soccer field below, speaking a language he couldn’t figure out, sitting next to him on his bed and, worst of all, leaving the room to wander around the hotel. I didn’t believe him because I woke up in the same clothes I went to bed in. “But you’re wearing the same hat,” he said. “And you and I are sharing a room …” The amount of anxiety that came over me when I realized Andre was my Spanish roommate and he was telling the truth was immeasurable. I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life.
To make the story funnier, sadder, and definitely weirder, it turns out both Jeff McKee and I, totally unaware of what we were doing, went for sleepwalk strolls around the hotel that first night in Portugal. We both somehow made it back to our rooms and both have a hard time believing what actually happened. I’m just glad we weren’t each other’s roommates that trip …
