Whoever came up with the idea of combining a helicopter flight with a pub crawl must be a fun person to be around. On a normal pub crawl you see a lot of similar looking pubs and the atmosphere is generally (in my experience) pretty seedy, but on this one you get to go to some really different ones. Naturally this is a Sydney experience - I can believe that Australians would have come up with the concept, flying over the harbour, Olympic Park and the Hunter Valley vineyard region. The whole trip takes about seven hours and if you’re nervous when you first go up this soon dissipates as the blood alcohol content rises.

After the first bit of scenic flying around Sydney (the pilot tells us you can see sharks from this height?) we headed out north up the coast, first stop Wollombi Pub, then on to the Hunter and Pokolbin where we had a posh lunch at a winery, last stop the Settlers Arms Inn, St. Albans on the Macdonald River (apparently it’s Australia’s third oldest pub?).

The plan was that we do something unbelievable memorable for a birthday - something no one could ever top ever. There were lots of “Same again?” “No gotta fly” jokes and some light discussion of what would happen if we were to get too close to the blades ‘cause we were too wasted, but in reality the real buzz was the experience rather than the alcohol and none of us wanted to get too tanked ‘cause we wanted to be able to remember the whole glorious occasion (and ’cause we were warned that if we got too drunk we’d be left behind) - we were also told not to touch any of the controls and not to wave?

We got to wear pilot helmets - that’s pretty sexy in itself and that‘s before we even got into the EC120B (we called her Shirley Bird - as in whirly.) - we were literally loving our lives, especially the birthday boy who didn’t know what we had planned. It feels pretty cool to show up to places in a helicopter…we could have easily picked up if we had have had any extra seatbelts…

Written by  Blair Metcalfe.

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