Easily Beirut-Istanbul-Tehran...
Background: I'm in Beirut with a buddy from college. One of our other friends is in Greece, scheduled to fly to Iceland, unknown routing. He misses his flight out of Athens, texts us and says there's a flight to Beirut landing around 1 or 2am, should he just come. We say of course. Through a friend from Paris, I was introduced to a Syrian girl whose entire family has relocated to Beirut due to the war. They'd rented out a beach club for some sort of event and everyone gets ANNIHILATED. The two of us pile in her car with her afterwards to follow her brother to a club. At some point along they way they get lost and she runs into her brothers car (don't worry, we DID tell her she shouldn't be driving, but this fell on deaf ears). Anyway, we get to the club BO18, which is in some sort of old bomb shelter and continue drinking heavily. Our friend lands at BEY, we tell him we're staying at Le Grey, he takes a cab over, tells them he wants a room and drops his bags without ever going up to the room and heads to meet us at BO18. He goes from sober to BLACKOUT drunk in about 45 minutes. Sometime after 3am he tells me he lost several thousands dollars in hard currency that he had in his pocket and dropped on the floor. I asked him WHY he would carry that much cash, his response "I didn't want to feel poor." At this point he gave me his phone and wallet because he slurred that he couldn't be trusted to hold onto them. We get home after dawn, etc...the next afternoon he calls my room telling he is screwed because his phone, wallet, etc...are gone. I remind him he gave them to me for safe keeping, I have them and I'm going back to sleep.
The day in question: The three of us had been drinking all day at a beach club, but being as me and my buddy had an early flight to IST connecting to Tehran, not the most normal destination for Americans, we said we were going to take it easy. The friend who came in from Athens was hoping to get us to miss our flight and stay in Beirut. He goaded us into going to Skybar "we'll just have a few, we won't stay out late!" You know how that goes. Bottle service, out of control through 5am, etc...after falling for the old "just a few drinks" lie, my buddy and I got back to the hotel and bought into another lie. We figured since we had to go to leave for the airport around 730am and it was already after 5, that there was no point in sleeping, so we told ourselves "we won't sleep, we'll just rest our eyes." Of course, we slept. I woke up less than an hour before our flight was due to takeoff and FREAKED OUT. Anyone who has been to BEY knows what an absolute horrorshow that airport is. To this day I have NO IDEA how we made it on that plane, we were still VERY intoxicated but the driver pulled some F1 moves and we got to BEY, checked in, through security and on the plane like 2 minutes before the doors closed, which was handy because if we missed that connection we were not going to make it to Iran. We passed out on the flight to IST and were in rough shape waiting for the connection. Buddy was puking in the bathroom etc...finally we land in Iran dying of hangover and in very rough shape, the terminal was sweltering and when they saw American passports they naturally pulled us aside for additional questioning. I was very, very happy to get to my lousy hotel bed that night and sleep.