The Quest

Now that I’m off the water, I’m considering the next step for new, engaging blog content. I hit upon an idea: I could get a tattoo from every tattoo studio in Pierce County. This would be expensive, but perhaps they would do it for free if I let them simply tattoo their business logo on me. They could even include a web address, or a QR code. Knowing their work would be displayed right next to their competitors, they would be motivated to do a stellar job.

I checked, and there are something like 80 tattoo studios in Pierce County. If I limit it to Tacoma city limits, it cuts that number in half, but it’s still a lot. I would need a bigger canvas. Perhaps I could achieve that by eating a pizza at all the restaurants in the greater Tacoma area that serve pizza. Yelp puts that number at over 200. Or I could have a few craft beers on tap – Yelp also puts that number at over 200 establishments, and I would guess the pizza and beer overlap would be in the high 90 percentile, so I could do a combo of both.

Just the thought of the enormity of these undertakings was weighing heavy on me. But then Ann came up with a quest that I didn’t need to invent – it was already laid out before us. She gained this insight from a traditional source of wisdom, the bathroom wall in bar. This quest, although related to my idea, would be much more achievable, and comes with the added bonus of a free t-shirt upon successful competition. You only have to visit five pubs on the little passport, spend at least $10 (less than two beers), get a stamp from each, and redeem it for a free t-shirt when finished.

I’m going into Five Pubs Tour Tacoma with confidence. We already have two of our boxes checked, both of which we did when Ann’s parents were visiting. We had cheeseburgers at Parkway Tavern one night, and fried chicken at Terry’s Office Tavern another, and both were excellent. Of the three remaining, one is less than a 10-minute walk from our house, another is about a mile and a half, the fifth is back in the old neighborhood that we just left.

When Ann and I were first married, we were living in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the Northwest corner of the state. We stumbled into a passport program while visiting a local state park, and decided to do it. It was supposed to be a two-year program, but we came in late and only had nine months left. But in those nine months, we made it to all 72 of Missouri’s state parks and historic sites. We did this on weekends only, without taking a day off work, even though some sites were a several-hour drive away. Admittedly, during the short daylight hours of winter, we sometimes set up camp in the dark, and took it down the next morning, still in the dark, leaving the state park without ever seeing it in daylight.  I don’t think three more pubs will be a problem for us.