I remember being young and barhopping. I’d drink freely in noisy crowded rooms with music destroying my eardrums every New Year’s Eve. When I was older I would go to parties at friends’ houses. Older still and we’d be so frazzled by NYE that we’d buy a bunch of gourmet goodies and picnic in our living room while watching the ball drop on TV. It was wonderful to have the downtime just the two of us. Now we’re over 60 and we were wracking our brains for how to recover the exuberance of our youth this year.

I fondly remembered the fun of the barhopping days while acknowledging that I simply didn’t have the stamina for it anymore. But then I thought – midnight’s just a number, right? I can celebrate the year coming to a close without requiring myself to do it right up until the bell tolls! So I approached my husband with my concept of an Old Man’s New Year’s Eve.

We live in a downtown tourist area now, surrounded by some truly excellent bars, pubs, restaurants, bakeries, and numerous gelato shops. I suggested that we do the rounds of our favourite places having a drink here, and appetizer there, a dessert somewhere else, until we were tired and went home. The key to the success of this plan is we would start at 4:00 in the afternoon. We’d have the places pretty much to ourselves, be home early, and if we went to bed before midnight the year’s odometer would still tick over.

It. Was. GLORIOUS!

We started at our go-to place, Beyond the Pale. I had a half pint of excellent Farmgate Cider and shared crispy cauliflower donair and a really interesting composed salad. Aside from the basic greens there was butternut squash, fried tofu, sliced apples and pine nuts. It was good to start the crawl off healthy. Next we went to Embers where I ordered a Side Car (to the delight of the bartender) and the best appetizer in all of Ottawa – spicy tuna on crispy rice. While waiting for the tuna I noticed they had a gluten-free Basque cheesecake with pulverized GF cookies and caramel sauce. Well I could hardly pass that up!

After Embers I was feeling full, but my husband wanted an actual entree so we tried, and failed, to get into Chez Lucien. It’s usually crowded so we weren’t shocked. They serve good food and Waupoo’s Cider and have the best juke box of all time, so we go there when we can get in. Having failed at acquiring supper, I suggested that we go to the pub next door to our condo because I thought one more drink would make walking on the ice tricky. The hubby wisely agreed.

Pubwell’s is a fairly good chain restaurant with one fantastic cocktail. I’ve been told that I would like the place better if I could have some of their gluten-packed entrees like their massive fish a chips, but my choices there are somewhat limited. Still I will eat mediocre falafel any day if I can have a Modern English with it. It’s a gin drink with St. Germain, cucumber, basil, lime, and vanilla. As predicted it did me in, so I carefully tottered the 30-40 steps back home for a couple hours of binging Britbox murder mysteries with a full belly and a full heart. We even managed to stream the ball drop at midnight – immediately followed by hitting the hay.

Bonus points: Because we drank water and tea while watching TV we woke up the next day without hangovers.

I would recommend this kind of celebration to people of all ages. I’m certainly going to do it again next year!