The mascot for my little Florida beach town is a gecko. I suppose because the alliteration with Gulfport is good, but also because geckos are everywhere here, and we all like them because they eat bugs. So they thrive, and anything that thrives on eating bugs is good, in my book. There are wildly brightly painted geckos all over town, such as the one above. On houses, buildings, in windows, on cars, clothes, jewelry….I have one on the wall of my house on the deck. Having a gecko as the town mascot means every event here is a gecko “something”. Like the Gecko ball. The Gecko fest. And last night, the Gecko Pub Crawl and Poker Run.

For the pub crawl, you buy a ticket for $20, and tickets are limited to 200. Then you get a drink, usually beer, wine or well drink, at each of 6 restaurants, and you pick a card out of a deck and on the ticket they stamp which card you chose. At the end of the night, they give prizes for the best hand, the worst hand, and then one random hand.

While we are not people who go out drinking for fun, we do occasionally go to a local bar for happy hour drinks down by the beach. We thought the pub crawl might be fun to go to. All the restaurants were by the beach, half of them had live music, and we thought it might be a way to meet some new people. And we did. Met some nice folks, younger than us in their 50’s but out for the same thing, to have fun and meet people. Dan has a very pronounced Boston accent. It’s a great conversation starter, people are always asking where he’s from, and often go right to “What part of Boston are you from?” We each had a few drinks, though not six, lol. I had a glass of wine and 2 ½ drinks I think. I got the free drinks from the other places and sat at the table sipping water, lol. Because I cannot even imagine drinking 6 drinks. 3 ½ was plenty for me. Dan had a couple more than me, but not to excess. Besides, he’s a big guy. Not heavy, just tall and big, so I think he handles it better.

I expected to wake up not feeling so well this morning, lol. But actually I feel pretty good. Maybe because I was up on and off in the night chugging water, flushing my system. But at any rate it was fun. The last place, where the winners were announced, was especially fun, with everyone ending up there and many people very, as Dan called it, uninhibited, by that point. The bar had a great band, and a big dance floor (we even got up and danced…once…..). There was a broad spectrum of age groups represented, from 20’s to older than us, lots of laughing and silliness. A lot of people dress in costume for this stuff around here, and that was fun to see.

It was fun to get out into the community, meet people from the area, and just laugh a lot. The whole thing is a fundraiser for local charities. However….I told Dan, maybe next year save the $40 on tickets and $40 on food, and go anchor out in the bay and watch it from there. Glad we did it once, don’t really need to do it again though.

As ever, love and light to all.