Bourbon streets

Ed and Heidi Adkins of Let’s Do Things have been organizing costumed pub crawls in Reno for eight years. They’re starting off 2016 with a brand new one.

I was crawling around the internet the other day—

Ha Ha, crawling.

Yeah, and I saw that the first crawl of 2016 is a brand new crawl. Can you tell me about it?

Yes. I’d love to. That’s the Mardi Crawl, and we’re pretty excited because we traditionally—the second crawl we ever started was on Valentine’s. And we’ve done that for a few years, but Valentine’s is less of a time for crawling. … We decided, man, what would we do? Everyone really liked the Pajama Crawl we do, and that was what was happening on Valentine’s the last couple of years. So I thought let’s move that to warmer months. …You know, one thing I’ve always wanted to do, because around Valentine’s I’ll always see information about Mardi Gras happening, and every time I think, “Oh, man, that’s what we should be doing is Mardi Gras, not Valentine’s during that period.” So, I spent some time researching Mardi Gras. I’ve been to New Orleans, and the one time that I went it was like going to a home you haven’t been before, like a lot of people will say that they consider Burning Man home. I like Burning Man. It’s great, but New Orleans is like distilled booze, cigars, seediness, music—all of the stuff that I love and love about even Reno, you know, at times. … So this year, we thought, “Hey, let’s do a Mardi Crawl.” We’ve tried to look at everything that makes Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras… So, we’re not going to be able to implement everything we want, but eventually, we’d love to have a parade. We’d love to have everything that we can kind of bring to the folks, especially who live here. … When Hurricane Katrina happened, a lot of folks who were displaced were actually placed in Reno. And so there’s actually like a collection of people from here because of that, too. So we’d like to create something that they’d want to come to, not just another crawl. … We think long and hard before ever adding one. What kind of impact is this going to have? Why are we doing this? That kind of thing. We don’t just add them. We’ve added very slowly during this eight years, and we’ve only added a few as time has gone on. If we do it, we want to do it right. This year what’s cool is every bar is going to have—we bought, obviously, first thing we started with when looking at it, you can’t get away from the fact that everyone is going to want beads. So we bought—I think 150 pounds of beads are on their way now. That’s like 3,000 strands. … And then we talked to the bars who agreed to be involved about what traditional drinks are served like the hand grenades and hurricanes and others…The best part about, I think, the combination between the Mardi Gras and the crawls is like there’s so much that is similar as far as a parade and party and massive kind of mishmash that you find over there. …The more we looked into this, we were like, “Man, this is obvious. We should have done this a long time ago.”

All right. All right.

Yeah. Yeah, in one big blurb, that’s the Mardi Crawl. So, we’re going try to do a foot parade with a bunch of different kinds of performers, like a brass band, and we’re going to try to get a jazz band out. We’ll have stilt walkers.

This year?

Yeah. So, we’ll kind of just do a little, small foot parade from bar to bar that will start off the event ’cause we do that for the steampunk crawl already. The steampunk crawl is just a lot smaller. The Steampunk Tavern Stroll is what we call it.