Crawlin' for a Cure

It always feels good to give back to the society that we all take from so abundantly. This is especially true when giving back yields an abundance of booze and gourmet food. Enter: The Edible Crawl for a Cure, a fundraiser to help fight cystic fibrosis (I didn't know what it was either). That's right, somebody came up with the brilliant idea of getting you drunk and letting you wander around town while fighting for a good cause.

Here's how it works: You pay a modest entry fee and form a team of 10-30 well-intentioned folks, you get a card with 20 fine restaurants, bars and eateries around the midtown area, and from noon to 5 PM, you try to make it to every location, where you're served a drink and some food, often times something pretty fancy lookin'.

The only downside was that they forced me to get up at noon on a Saturday! But hey, I'll get up early for a good cause.

There was a wide variety of places on the list, ranging from fine dining to that yogurt place on the corner. Ya walk in, flash your card, and they serve you up some eats and drinks. A fine time, to be sure, but there was one complication... what they gave you wasn't always compatible with what you just got. The drinks offer a fine example of this... The first place fills you up with a mohito. You then move onto a pub that tops you off with a lager, followed by a glass of sangria at an Italian restaurant, a cup o' joe at the little coffee house, and a shot of tequila offered up by the Mexican restaurant across the street, and that's only the first 25% of your "crawl".

Throw in some tacos, hummus, frozen yogurt (fro-yo) a side of bruschetta and some mac-n-cheese, and that's when the adventure really begins. And don't forget, you're huffin' it from place to place in a desparate effort to squeeze in all twenty stops! Who would have thought curing cystic fibrosis would take so much work!

Along the route, we crossed paths with former NBA star and wannabe-mayor Kevin Johnson, who shook my hand and insisted that Sacramento needed "change", a term that seems to be quite popular these days.

Hey, good luck to ya.

So as time ticked by increasingly faster after each stop, we had to kick it into high gear if we were ever going to finish this adventure. Quick drink, quick eat, and we were on to the next stop. People began disappearing from our group, perhaps passing out in an alley or calling a cab to head home, but there was no time to find out...

Rounding the block and dashing to a small coffee house hidden in an alley, we finished just minutes after the 5 PM deadline. Fortunately (well, not for my stomach), they still were willing to fill us up on coffee as we checked off the last destination on our map of culinary debauchery.

So what was the grand prize for completing all stops? A 6 PM hangover and finding yourself stranded in midtown when all you want to do is take a nap. But hey, it was for a good cause.