Driving Inertia- A Texas Break
- Well, at least the Crawfish were good.
- When It All Goes Wrong
- It’s a Shotgun Marriage in New Orleans
- Avoiding Death and STDs on Bourbon Street
- The Best Beer in New Orleans
- Doing the Tourist Thing: Cafe du Monde in New Orleans
- The Battle of the Po’ Boy
- A Quick Tour of New Orleans
- Lisa’s Been to All 50 States!
Billy Goat Tavern | The Loop, Chicago
There’s one bar that I like to go to after work and that bar is Old Timer’s. It’s dingy, close by, inexpensive, and filled with an interesting crowd. If I worked on the other side of the Chicago River, I would go to the Billy Goat Tavern. It’s very dingy, inexpensive, and filled with a very interesting crowd, but the Michigan Avenue bridge is under construction and I need to take Lower Wacker to get ther. If you are a troll or a cave-person, you would love this bar. Which is another way of saying …
The fucking bar is underground. And it’s underground in an area of Chicago where everything is elevated up about 20 feet, so it’s under that, underground. If you’ve seen Dark Knight and remember the motorcycle scene, B. Wayne could have hung up the cape and stopped here for a Billy Goat Lager instead of chasing the bad guys. And in the middle of the winter, those lower roads are filled with salt dust clouds and ice patches and they lack sidewalks, which makes for a very interesting walk over to the place.
But the crowd is the most fun. The place was made famous by SNL and a skit they did about the cheeseburger lunch crowd. Which means: tourists come here. They come to this shitty dive bar and get a beer in the evening and a cheeseburger for lunch, and they huddle in their groups and stare at the madness around them and laugh and have fun and are surrounded by some of the most serious regular drunk patrons in Chicago. Serious regulars. Guys that have been coming here for decades still come here to get boozed up before heading home. It’s fantastic.