Beer.

A few years ago the Reading Beer Festival put out a list of 18 local pubs about six weeks before the beer fest. If you bought a pint at one of the pubs they would put a sticker on your list, and if you collected all 18 you got free admission to the beer fest, a free pint glass, and several free pints. Six of the pubs were right in town centre, a few were on the other side of the river or near the university, and the rest were scattered around the outskirts of town and in the surrounding countryside.

The day that the list came out I sat in the Hobgoblin with Nick and Daniel. We spread a map out on the table and started plotting all of the pubs on it. There were two that Nick insisted would be impossible to reach unless we could find someone with a car. I didn't think they looked that hard but Nick insisted they were impossible. So the next morning I set off on my bike to the farthest one. I should mention that I had just bought the bike two days earlier and hadn't been on a bike in a couple of years prior to that. I found the pub and had a lovely pint of Bateman's Dark Mild. That evening the guys were over for dinner and we started discussing the list again. I pulled mine out casually and Daniel was the first to notice that I had a sticker that they didn't. That was a good moment.

We went on to visit every pub on that list over the next few weekends, many of them more than once. It was a great way to get out and explore some of the country footpaths and historic pubs. Strictly speaking it wasn't a tour, but a series of day trips. It was a great time though.