Travel with Indigo

To catch our flight back to Florida, Grant and I returned to Sydney where our travels began a month before. We had a few days to waste so I walked around the CBD some more, visited some places I had missed and generally goofed off. Grant, however, was bent on a mission that he had secretly begun when we were here last and now was determined to complete.

It seems that he discovered a pub near our hotel, The Australian Hotel pub, that had on one of its walls a large plaque on which were affixed brass plates bearing the names of an honor roll of a dubious sort. To get your name on the board it was necessary to drink under the supervision of pub personnel one full beer of each of the 104 types of beer carried by the place, all brewed in Australia. You could of course spread this achievement over as many days or even months as you’d like but time was a luxury Grant didn’t have. Though he’d begun his odyssey during our last stay here he was still well short of his goal.

So he now set about the gritty task of consuming as many beers as he could during the pub’s opening hours. I would occasionally drop by to check on his well-being, and I must say that as the time of our departure grew near it seemed he would go down in ignominious defeat.  On the Saturday night before our Sunday departure, the pub was scheduled to close at midnight and would not open again until the next Monday when we would be long gone. It seemed like he had no chance to reach his goal. Then, at just after 10pm on that Saturday night, he sent me a text message, fairly coherent under the circumstances, announcing “I did it!” as indeed he had. And he was the first American to do so as well.