So it's been a bad day, week, month... whatever - You're just looking for a way to escape for a few hours. To unwind as my mom likes to say.
Happy Hour to the rescue!
I've always loved the idea of happy hour. It's a time for co-workers, friends, and complete strangers to collectively relax and let off some steam. After all, nothing soothes the pains of the daily grind like a few tasty pints... or ice-cold cocktails if that's more your style.
I've never had a problem making it to the pub and enjoying myself. Rather, I seem to have trouble finding an affordable happy hour in an agreeable location. But no longer!
Urban Drinks [dot] com
UrbanDrinks.com makes finding the next great happy hour super simple. You can get a list of happy hours in your area - broken down by city and then neighborhood. Then drill further for a list of all happy hour destinations in a given neighborhood.
The neighborhood list comes complete with times, specials, directions, map, and more!
The site has some community driven content features built in. You can tag any of the destinations just like you would a photo on Flickr. Tagging gives real power to the community as they, err... we, get to determine what makes a particular happy hour destination important. Also, you can search by tags to find similar locations.
Another nice feature is reviews. If you find a great happy hour and want to share it with the world, write a review. Found a total rip complete with overpriced drinks and crappy service? Write a review!
Map your next pub crawl
I think my favorite feature might be the Pub Craw section.
You can see a list, with accompanying map, of crawls that other users have done. I added a crawl that my friends and I used to do back in college - the Pre-Fall Crawl. Of course, back when I was at OSU there were about 10 other bars between stops number 1 and 4 on the current list... but those bars are all now gone. :(
I can already see all kinds of possibilities for this feature - perhaps mapping out next St. Patty's day!
Note: At the time of this writing Urban Drink only had three cities included in their listings - Columbus, OH; Portland, OR; and Seattle, WA. But fear not as they promise to be adding more soon, and often.
This past weekend we celebrated one of my favorite holidays - St. Patrick's Day! I've blogged about St. Patty's before, but this post is more to share some pictures of the day's events than anything else.
We started the day off by meeting up at Timmy & Julie's place over in Grandview for some several pints of Guinness - and you know how I loves me some Guinness! By mid-afternoon The Buckeyes had moved on to the next round of the NCAA tourney, most of the party guests had arrived, and I had several pints under my belt... so naturally it was time to get started with The Relays.
The Relays?
Last year at Timmy's (now annual) St. Patty's Day party a few of us (namely myself, Dan Bedar, and Derrick Long) came up with the brilliant idea to hold team relay races - complete with pints of Guinness of course! The key points to last year's races were spinning around in circles while holding a baseball bat to the ground, drinking a pint of Guinness, tossing bean bags, and running line sprints.
This year we altered the format of the races a bit:
- Two large teams (shenanigans vs. shamrock), composed of several smaller two-person teams.
- Several heats would be run, pitting a single two-person team from each of the larger teams against each other. The winner of each heat scored one (1) point for their respective large team.
- Each heat was composed of the following "steps"
- Team must drink 1 pint of Guinness
- Team must throw 3 bean bags through hole in Cornhole board. If a player misses the board entirely, the teammates must exchange places (by running to the other end of the boards).
- Team will use two (2) plastic spoons to transport an egg approx 15 ft. and drop it through a basketball hoop (4 ft. high). The egg may only be touched by the spoons. If the egg is dropped and breaks, the team must restart step #3.
- First team to drop their egg through the hoop wins the heat and scores a point for their large team.
- Each point earns the larger team an attempt to kick a field goal (with a small plastic field goal game - thanks to Brady Long for lending us his toys!).
- Team with most field goals wins The Relays.
In the end, the shenanigans ended up winning in sudden death overtime - I believe it was John Bibler Bryan Jensen who scored the winning field goal. Good job buddy!
After The Relays we all had a few more drinks and then headed to the Official St. Patty's Day headquarters here in central Ohio - Byrne's Pub. Much fun was had at Byrne's, and we've got some pictures to prove it!
You can see all of my pictures from the day at my Flickr page.