Continued from Part 4…

Sunday, July 19, 2009. Thee 5th and final day of our July barhopping trip that would end up taking us to 101 bars.

We were not in any particular hurry today, so we were slow at getting ready. Once we finally checked out, we drove around downtown Omaha to take pictures that we were unable to get the night before. We drove around downtown a lot, actually, because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the freeway bridge.

Council Bluffs, IA

(pop 58,268)
Originally named Kanesville, the town was later renamed for the meeting of Lewis & Clark with the Otoe tribe near this location in the Loess Hills. Brigham Young was named head of the Mormon church here before the Mormons migrated to Utah. Today casinos are a major part of the Council Bluffs economy, and Google operates a server farm here.

When we were first planning this trip (after changing our minds about Chicago and then Ohio as potential destinations), Council Bluffs was intended to be a major stop due to having over 30 bars to chose from. In fact, until 2 weeks before this trip, it was intended to be the main Saturday destination, with us just hitting a few Omaha bars on the way through. But we found that the bars in Council Bluffs are too spread out in order to make it a practical drinking destination for our purposes, so replaced it with Omaha at the last minute.

This would prove to have been a good move, because unbeknownst to us, RAGBRAI, an annual bike ride across Iowa, was in Council Bluffs on Saturday and apparently nearly ever bar in town was jam packed.

For whatever reason we were craving Chinese food, so once we were in Council Bluffs we stopped at the first Chinese buffet we found.

Bluffs China Buffet
1702 W Broadway # 3
Council Bluffs, IA 51501-3867
(712) 388-0388
[map]

With full stomachs we headed to downtown Council Bluffs, and found it inaccessible due to construction. We navigated around to the east end to try to come at it from that side. We parked as close as we could, then started walking down the torn-up Broadway to see if we could find anything open. We found only one place.

98. Barley’s

114 W Broadway
Council Bluffs, IA 51503-4311
(712) 322-0306
barleysbar.com
[map]
(Click thumbnails to view photos)

This was a really nice looking old bar. However, the bartender was MIA. We sat there for about 10 minutes before she appeared from a back room, surprised to see us.

After she served us she disappeared again. A few minutes later a woman came in who had left her card here the previous night. She looked around, checked the other room, then came back. “Is anyone working here?” she asked us. “Nope, we had to serve ourselves,” B joked. She finally managed to find the bartender and got her card.

We left and started to drive away, then suddenly noticed that a place a couple of doors down had opened. We re-parked and headed up the street.

99. Glory Days

106 W Broadway
Council Bluffs, IA 51503-4311
(712) 256-5922
[map]
(Click thumbnails to view photos)

This was a pretty nice sports bar. We discussed our plans for the day — would we stop when we reached 100, or was 100 just a goal and we’d hit up a few more until we were ready to go home? We decided we would stop at 100 since it was a nice round number.

We walked to the other end of the block just in case anything else had opened, and did find one more place where the door was open. We went inside and sat at the bar, then a guy sweeping informed us they weren’t open yet. I didn’t catch what the name of this place was, though it was probably OP’s Sports Tavern at 162 W. Broadway.

Here’s a few pics from the two parts of downtown Council Bluffs we visited…
(Click thumbnails to view photos)

100. Quarthouse Bar

107 Pearl St
Council Bluffs, IA 51503-0824
(712) 322-9830
[map]
(Click thumbnails to view photos)

We headed over to Main Street and drove up and down both sides trying to decide what our next bar would be. We were looking specifically for a place called Uncle Charlie’s Boston Boozers at 519 S. Main because that name is just awesome. But it either does not exist anymore or is very well hidden because we could not find it. But we did find the Quarthouse, and it was open.

This was a nice, quiet old-timer dive with canned beer. There we a few other guys in here. I believe everyone was watching golf.

Now, for those keeping score, this was bar #100. But we thought it was #99. Why? Because clear back on Thursday night, when we went to RK’s Pub at the very end of the night, I accidently skipped a page in the Thursday notebook when I wrote it down. So each time I had added up the total, I had missed RK’s and been coming up 1 short of where we actually were. So after we left here, I rechecked the count because I wanted to make damn sure we would reach 100 bars and not find out later I’d double-counted something and we’d only made it to 99.

This time, though, I found my mistake. I rechecked, and B rechecked. We’d already been to our 100.

“Well that sucks,” I said. “I’d really like to have known we were at our last bar of the day when we were actually there.”

We got into the car and started heading home, feeling a little glum about missing our chance to acknowledge the end of the trip.

…

…

…

I had noticed, as we were driving towards the highway, that B seemed deep in thought. We had made it about made it a few blocks, when all the sudden his face seemed to light up.

“You know,” he said, “Instead of ‘101 Dalmatians,’ it could be ‘101 Libations.’ You could make the logo look like the one from the movie, and put beer spots instead of dalmatian spots on the background.”

I immediately changed course and we headed to the one bar I had actually confirmed ahead of time would be open today.

101. Caddy Shack

1426 4th Ave
Council Bluffs, IA 51501-3934
(712) 322-9708
caddyshackinc.com
[map]
(Click thumbnails to view photos)

We were the first customers of the day, and the bartender was still cleaning up from previous night’s RAGBRAI crowd that had kept him extremely busy Saturday night.

This was a spacious roadhouse type bar with some pretty entertaining graffiti in the men’s room. We played our final game of Golden Tee for the trip before hitting the highway for real.

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After re-entering Missouri we stopped for gas at a truck stop and discovered that it had a basement bar. We didn’t visit it, instead we started scheming for a future Saturday tour of extreme Northwest Missouri.

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101 bars in 4-1/2 days. Home well before sunset with plenty of time to recover before returning to work the next day. This was a really good trip with a lot of fun memories.

I don’t know when the next bar trip will be or where it will take us, but I’m already looking forward to it. :)

-THE END-