You would have thought his past Saturday was October 31 with all the costumed revelers in Coconut Grove as part of the Last Call Pub Crawl's Halloween Crawl.
The concept was simple: "Crawlers" hit a series of bars, usually four or five, all within walking distance of each other. One weekend it may be the Grove, one weekend South Beach, one weekend the Gables... you get the idea.
You pay a fee to Last Call, which organizes a free shot and happy hour drink specials (usually 2-4-1) at each bar. The result was a no-brainer - good ole drunken carousing Greek style (fraternity, not Socrates). Organizers, Ricky Carral and Diego Insausti, did an admirable job of organizing the event and herding the crawlers from bar to bar. The guys from Last Call invited us to tag along and as dedicated journalists, we could not decline.
Last Call schedules crawls pretty much every single weekend of the year. The Halloween Crawl started off at Calamari, then staggered to Greenstreet Café, stumbled to Mr. Frog's, and crawled to Mr. Moe's, where those of us still standing continued to down drink special after drink special and toss back the last free shot.
The fact is that you can gather a group of friends and do your own version of a pub crawl, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of going out for drinks. Most of us stick to our own herd when we engage in non-organized drinking.
Besides the obvious benefits of free shots and discounted drinks, when you're part of a pub crawl, you're a part of something larger than your circle of friends. You meet new people - people who are down to meet you instead of huddling with their three college buddies over their pints of Guinness. And everyone is there to have a good time. We've been to two thus far, the first was Mardi Gras themed, and we spoke with strangers who by the end of the night were friends.
You'd think with all the drinking there might be some, ahem, unsavory characters, but we've only run into one pain in the keister versus the two pub crawls we've attended. Yes, Captain Sausage, we're talking to you.
If you've never been part of a pub crawl, we highly recommend it. Besides the allure of a diminutive bar tab, chances are you'll end up meeting complete strangers who become fellow crawlers for life.
Crawlers get down almost every weekend. For information about prices, dates, and times of the next crawl visit comecrawl.com.
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