“This isn’t a pub crawl! It’s a tour,” says Discover Houston Tours founder Sandra Lord, making it clear that winos aren’t welcome on the Downtown Houston Night Crawl. “We’re going to visit the Old Cotton Exchange, La Carafe and the Char Bar, among others. The last tour we hit almost 20 different places. One of the neat things about the historic district, a lot of the places are unique, there’s nothing cookie-cutter about it. People, they were amazed at how different each bar was from the others.” Oh, and winos actually are welcome, they just need to wait until after the tour to start drinking. “The tour is just to familiarize you with the district. People go back to the bars afterward on their own,” says Lord. Think you already know all about Houston’s downtown scene? Think again. “It never fails — about 15 minutes into the tour, the Houstonians are saying, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and I didn’t know this was here.’ I love that.”

This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2007.