Who's Your Paddy Pub Crawl: Not a big fan.

I love pub crawls.

Little Skirt, Big Skirt ;o)

And I love St. Patrick's Day.

And of course, I love Greenville.

One would think that the general conclusion on a St. Patrick's themed pub crawl to 5 Greenville bars would be summed up in the word AWESOME!

Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Remember how much fun we had during the 12 10 Bars of Christmas pub crawl back in December? Even though we didn't make it to 12 bars? Well, we figured 5 bars was definitely do-able for this "Who's Your Paddy" pub crawl, and as an added bonus it was a bus pub crawl! So we figured we'd end up at a couple bars outside of downtown. Maybe even some places we've never been to. I anxiously awaited the email that would notify me of the names of the five bars we were going to...but it never came. I'm not sure if they really were trying to keep this thing a secret, or if they were having trouble locking down bars that would agree to deal with a bunch of rowdy pub crawlers, or what.

On the party bus!

Still, I can deal with an air of mystery! Right? Right.

We at least knew that the crawl started at Sharkey's at 6:30 PM. Not a favorite place of ours due to a bad experience last spring, but this being a pub crawl, there can be some exceptions to our going out rules ;o)

Of course, we were already feeling a bit "eh" about the whole thing when we walked in and realized that there had never been a memo to dress crazy! Certainly, there were plenty of people who didn't even wear green, let alone a crazy costume...but we enjoy a good excuse to have some fun with our outfits and I wish there had been some sort of notification that anything would go for this pub crawl! Right on the heels of this issue came the fact that despite being "scheduled" to leave Sharkey's around 7:30, it was close to 8 PM before they blew the horn for us to board the bus. I suppose this wouldn't have been a big deal if we loved us some Sharkey's, but...you see where I'm going with this?

One long game of cornhole.

Next up was Connolly's, a bar that we do enjoy, but I suppose because our time at Sharkey's was prolonged that meant our time at Connolly's was cut short? Needless to say, we were not expecting to hear that horn blow about ten minutes to nine and had to rush to close a tab. Boo.

At this point we finally left downtown Greenville and I was hoping it would be for at least two stops. First we went to the Irish Pub, another place that's a-okay with us, and spent quite some time enjoying a couple games of cornhole and some free hot dogs. At this point there was no horn blown--not one that I heard anyway--and we had to "hear it through the grapevine" that it was time to go, which meant that we barely made the first round of buses (and yeah, I was tired of cornhole and wanted to see what our next stop would be!).

I was somewhat ho-hum to find that stop #4 was in fact back downtown -- On the Roxx, no less. But as this is yet another place that we enjoy, we took it in stride and hunkered down with some crazy Brits for the next hour. It wasn't until we got on the bus to head on to our last stop that things went seriously wrong - because we poured out of the bus (get it? heh) to find ourselves right in the doorway of Dixie's Tavern. Which, in case you haven't heard, we have good reason to downright loathe. Therefore we stuck it out for one drink, but as soon as the bar started really filling up we knew that it was time to bow out, and so we did.

Don't mess with my gin and tonics, for real. These nice ladies agreed.

All that said, our conclusion on this particular pub crawl? One big giant "EH". First, I'd originally heard that they would be capping this pub crawl at 80 people...only to arrive and find out that over 200 people had purchased tickets! Had this been a charity pub crawl, I could have let it slide, but none of the bars we went to were really built to handle a sudden influx of 200+ pub crawlers and it just made for one heck of a mess when it came to ordering drinks, paying tabs, going to the bathroom, etc. And again, I wish there had been more consensus on the "hey, it's not St Patrick's Day yet, but let's get crazy & creative with our outfits for this pub crawl!"

As for the buses? Completely unnecessary. It's March. The weather is decent. We only ended up visiting one bar outside of downtown anyway. The whole "get on the bus!" thing just became more of a hindrance than anything. When are they going to blow the horn? Are they even going to blow the horn? How long will I have to close my tab? Oh shit, I don't even know where we're going next because no one ever told me so if I miss the buses I guess I'm just out of luck!

See where I'm going with this?

Maybe next time we'll just schedule and orchestrate our own pub crawl ;o)