Last week a blurb from The Onion was passed around throughout my circle of friends:

Area Man Maps Out Drinking Strategy

“I think this article was written about Scoot,” quipped the instigator.

Little did he know how right he was.

A typical Scooterian barhopping trip, especially involving my usual anonymous cohort, goes through an extensive planning process.

1. We begin by visiting maps.google.com and simply doing a search for the word “bar”. The resulting map will display a red dot indicating every bar google knows about. We’ll pan about the map until we find an area of interest that we have time to get to.
2. The next step is to click on every dot to identify which places are actually bars, since the search also returns hits for BBQ restaurants, ranches, legal resources, steel manufacturing facilities, and ice cream stands.
3. We also eliminate chains, restaurants that happen to have bars, private fundraising organizations, dance clubs, strip clubs, wine bars, and places that are primarily music venues (since we refuse to pay a cover in order to pay to drink beer). However we do leave VFWs and American Legions on the list since we have about a 60% success rate at getting served at those. We’ve even managed to slip into the occasional Eagles Lodge.
4. Next we download the current liquor license database for the state we’ll be visiting. With these databases we can confirm if the places found by Google still exist (or did within the past year, anyway) and also find new places Google doesn’t know about yet.
5. Next up, a cocktail of Google searches, Street View searches, and Myspace searches to try to determine whether any places we are uncertain about are truly bars.
6. If we are unable to confirm a bar that is the only bar in a small town out of the way, we can sometimes use a phone call to get more information. However a failed phone call means nothing since turnover in the bar business is very high. If we cannot get in contact with the bar, a phone call or email to the local City Hall, Chamber of Commerce, or newspaper can usually get any remaining doubts cleared up.
7. Once a definitive bar list is established, it’s time to map the route. The route should allow sufficient time between drinks to remain sober as long as possible, and a conversion to a walking path once sobriety is no longer going to be an option.
8. As a supplement to the planning process, local Mexican or pizza restaurants are identified at strategic locations for lunch and dinner.
9. If it is a weekend or multi-day trip, motel and taxi service must be identified in advance as well. Preferably a motel room under $50 since it will only be used a few hours.
10. Finally, call the first 2-3 bars on the route to find their opening times so we know what time to get started.

On the way of the trip, we begin with a light breakfast an hour before the first bar and carry a cooler of bottled water to stay hydrated.

Still, even with the best of planning, 10-20% of our intended targets will not be open when we stop by. But that’s ok, because these are quickly replaced with “bonus bars” we didn’t know about that take us by surprise.

Currently, a maor 4-day barhopping trip is in the works. We are at stage 9 of the planning process. Stay tuned for details, I’ll be doing some live updates during the journey.