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Portland Night: The Book

Last night was something called 'Portland Night'.  Good times.  It was a lot of fun.  It happens every year during staff week at the camp.

They charter a couple buses for the staff and take us into Portland from the small town where the camp is located.

The first stop is the mall.  The buses leave here around 2 or so in the afternoon.  They arrive at the mall around 3.  The staff has about 2 hours to shop... Or... Alternatively, head over to On The Boarder and enjoy some happy hour margaritas.

I had a margarita since I didn't really want to do any shopping.  I'm going to shop when I get home.

Margaritas turned into doing shots for some people, but I decided to just stick with my margarita.  I also had a miller light.  We then got back the buses and went into the Old Port section of Portland.

Old Port general goes kind of a similar path each year.  Usually we start out on the upstairs back deck of Brian Boru.  I had a couple beers there and enjoyed the view and nice breeze coming in off the ocean.  Things start to get a little chaotic at this point as the number of drinks gets into the 2 or 3 range, or for some 4+.

We then move on to dinner.  Everyone kind of splits up and goes different places.  I went with some people to grab Elevation Burger.  It's a fast food place that serves fresh organic grass fed free range etc. etc. etc. burgers and such.  It's pretty good.  Not too expensive.

From there we went to a dive bar named Rosies.  They have 1 dollar drafts.  We each got a dollar draft.

From Rosies we went to a place called Fore Play.  This is when everyone is drunk enough to dance.  Dancing takes over the whole place.  It's a sports bar, so generally people don't dance.  When the camp takes over... The whole place is a dance floor.

Fore Play ends with the entire group in mass exodus to another place called Oasis.  Oasis sometimes has a DJ... This time they had a cover band playing outside.

More dancing and another beer.

This brings us to Bill's pizza before getting back on the bus.  I had a slice of pizza and a bottle of water at the pizza place.

And that's Portland night.

I'm leaving out a lot of details of the night... But that's the basic rundown things.

Each year there's usually a slightly different twist.  This year was no different.  This year we were introduced to "The Book".

The Book works like this...

You start with a small notebook at the first bar.  You write down anything interesting or noteworthy.  Then when you get to the next bar, you read back what happened.  Then The Book gets passed on to the next person.  They then write down things that happen at that bar.  Each time the group moves to a new bar The Book is read and handed off to the next person.

Additionally as The Book is read out people take sips of their drinks depending on who is mentioned in The Book from the previous bar.  If it's something that happens to everyone then everyone drinks.  If it's only something that happened to one person, that person will take a sip of their drink.

Then The Book is passed to someone new and they now keep record of notable events.

The next time I head out with a group of people to do a little bit of bar hopping, I'm going to try out creating my own book of events.  Maybe minus the whole drinking game part.  But I like the idea of keeping track of the nights events in a book and then reading the book as it gets written.  The original idea came from one of the staff here at camp who first experienced it during a pub crawl for a bachelor party.

At the very end of the night you read back through the entire book and laugh at the funny anecdotal stories.  Really, it's just an excuse to laugh at the silly things you will undoubtably do when you head out with friends to have some drinks.

All in all it was a good night.