The local pub

A cool thing about the States is that the servos sell beer and it is cheap. Our usual trip to the pub now involves a "40 walk". We get dropped off at the servo by taxi and buy a 40 oz (1.125L) bottle of beer for $2.75. You can also buy 2 x 24 oz cans of beer for $2.50 but it is harder to drink fast so most people only buy one can or a 40 oz bottle hence the name of the "40 walk". Once we have bought our beer, we then walk along a couple side roads for about 15 minutes, drinking our beer. In New York state it is illegal to walk along drinking alcohol in public so we have put our bottles or cans into brown paper bags. It makes you feel like a real wino. Supposedly the police need a warrant to search the paper bag so if the bottle is covered up they can't do much. Most of the time we don't manage to complete the drink by the end of the walk so we stand up from the pub to finish them off. I have earned a bit of a reputation because I can usually finish one before we get there when most have half a bottle to go.

The local is called "Friends" and it is a small bar/restaurant on a back road, surrounded by woods. It is quite small and when you get in there with 150 people it gets a little packed and ordering drinks can take a while. It is very a quaint and typical American pub with a TV at each end of the bar with baseball or basketball on. On my first night I was talking to one of the kiwis and said how typical it was and also stated that all it needed was a dead animal. We then looked up and there was some bull's horns rid above the bar.

A jug of Bud(weiser) costs $9 and you have to tip as well so it costs $10. For a good night where I don't want to get too drunk I do the 40 walk and then get a jug so it costs me about $13 for the night. The dumb thing is that because we have to grab a taxi, an evening out costs about US$25-$30.



Friends also has its own resident bear that lives in the woods out the back. That's right, a bear. It's a black bear with one cub that I've seen. It raids the rubbish skip out the back every night, dragging the bags to the edge of the woods and eating all the leftovers. I initially thought everyone was talking it up for about the first ten days until I actually saw the bear and her cub just before dusk one night as we were taking our bottles from the 40 walk to the skip. She was standing at the edge of the woods and was thinking about going to the skip but I think she was being cautious because we were around. I grabbed a few photos in the bad light. The black dot in the middle is the bear. We weren't going to get any closer for a better picture.




The owner of the pub, Jim, says he has tried everything to stop the bear getting in the skip including welding a steel bar on to the lid to keep them down but the bear managed to bend the bar without any effort and got in again so Jim is pretty much resigned to the fact that the bear gets in.