Peanut Races

How many times have you heard your parents start a sentence with “when we were young…” One such story that was told when my siblings, cousins and I were a bit older involved a drinking game they called peanut racing.

Flash-forward several years from the story being told (or backwards 8 years from now) to Crete, Greece when my cousins, Alex and Melinda, and my sister and I were there traveling. After visiting a farmers market, we decided to do happy hour on the rooftop of our Airbnb. Cheese, crackers, nuts and other assortments of food were brought out. We cracked open a local beer and sat back to enjoy the sun (and being off our feet) for a while.

Sometime during this happy hour we started talking about our parents and how cool it was that they were so close even though they lived on different continents (Melinda and Alex are from Australia) We started talking about some of the stories they’d shared with us when we remembered the peanut racing story. They shared with us how they played with drinking game often. At times they had a lucky peanut and how they’d put it in their pocket to travel from bar to bar. The idea of a peanut race is that you take a pint of beer, drop a peanut in the glass and watch the nut race to the top of the pint glass. The first to the top of the glass is the winner!

We had beer. We had nuts. We had cups, not pint glasses, that would do. We were off to the races. Sometime later, my brother (who was stuck in CT doing a class for his MBA) Facetimed us to say hi. He quickly found a cup, peanut and beer and joined in the fun too.

After awhile some of us had favorite nuts, others were still searching. But it was time for our dinner reservation. Off we went, peanuts in tow. Needless to say… we made a lot of friends that night at the bar that wanted to know what all the cheering was about, and then join in on the fun.