It was exactly a year ago to this day that we sat in The Spinning Mule in Bolton, and made the slightly-drunken decision to visit every Wetherspoon pub.

Our first thought was to stay in every Wetherspoon hotel, of which there are around 50 or so, most of which you can book for about £50 a night on a Sunday. We quickly wrote this idea off as too expensive, and decided instead we would visit all 800-or-so pubs instead. Somehow we thought that would be cheaper. Yeah, the maths wasn’t sound.

Regardless, we’ve ticked off a few of the chain’s hotels. Sometimes they’re just the best value for our trips!

So, a whole 365 days into the adventure, how’s it going?

Well, we’ve now ticked off 159 pubs from the list, which averages out to about three pubs a week. But as we discovered in our 2023 recap post, we’re not too consistent with it. Some months, like November 2023 and February 2024 we visited zero new pubs, whereas March 2024 saw us tick off a staggering 42.

In the last year we’ve managed to ‘complete’ seven regions; West Yorkshire is the largest, with 31 Spoons, and Nottinghamshire, our home county, comes second with 21 pubs. Norfolk (11), Cornwall (10), Leicestershire (10), Republic of Ireland (9), Isle of Wight (2) and Rutland (1) make up the rest.

We’ve been rather lax with updating the blog with reviews of these pubs, but we should be back to regular broadcasting this weekend as we start publishing our West Yorkshire pub visits.

Our adventures, and particularly our blog posts, have brought us a small amount of regional fame in the form of local news articles. Back in October the Swindon Advertiser posted an article about our trip to Swindon’s three Wetherspoons. In November the Milton Keynes Citizen posted a similar article, although this one did contain quite a few inaccuracies! Then, in February the Harborough Mail posted a couple of articles about our travels throughout Leicestershire and highlighting every pub we visited.

These articles tend to be received quite positively. We expected most of the comments to consider us rather strange for travelling miles to review Wetherspoon pubs, but no; people tend to be quite proud of their local Spoons, and they like to see others appreciating the pubs too.

Last month we even made our debut podcast appearance, chatting with Jimbo from the Ale & Audio podcast! Our interview was part of episode 192 of the podcast, which you can listen to for free on Spotify by clicking here.

What have we learned?

We’re certainly a tad poorer. Fortunately, each purchase shows up on our bank statement under the name of the individual pub, otherwise it would be far too tempting to search ‘Wetherspoon’ and despair at the total spent. Our spreadsheet originally included a ‘spend’ column, but that was quickly deleted too.

But the expense is quite worth it, as a brilliant side effect of visiting these pubs is seeing and travelling through some wonderful places. From the amazing views across the Irish Slieve Bloom Mountains to experiencing some brilliant English Heritage sites across the country, our journeys take us to some truly excellent places.

Equally enjoyable is simply experiencing places that we might not otherwise have visited. We probably wouldn’t have found a reason to ever visit Milton Keynes, for example, but spending the night there gave us a peculiar appreciation for the neutropian city, with its logical city planning and (best of all) its tiny delivery robots!

As a result we’ve driven thousands of miles across the country, from the tip of Cornwall, to the coast of Norfolk and even across The Solent to the Isle of Wight. Our endeavour has taken on almost every mode of transport you can imagine; a Boeing 737 across the Irish Sea to Ireland, a Wightlink ferry over to the Isle of Wight, trams across Dublin and Nottingham, with a fair sprinkling of buses and trains thrown in for good measure. And of course our legs have done a fair amount of work, too.

What’s next for Wetho Wanderers?

Unsurprisingly, the Spoons we’ve ticked off have radiated outwards from where we live; we’ve covered all of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and most of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Cambridgeshire. What that means is that our strategy has had to become more efficient, as we try to tick off areas of the country with a sort of bulk approach.

In March we ticked off all 11 Norfolk Spoons (and two in Suffolk) in one weekend, and the following weekend we visited 27 West Yorkshire pubs over three days, breaking our own record by visiting 15 in one day. Quite crucially we have to make sure we’re properly experiencing each pub in order to provide a fair review; we buy a drink in every pub and try to spend at least half an hour inside, covering everything we can.

We’ll continue this approach in 2024, trying to tick off pubs in a region by region basis. Scotland and Wales are both perfect candidates for camping trips, but with 63 pubs in Scotland and 53 in Wales, these will probably need more than just a single weekend each.

If you’re not already following our Instagram, head over and give us a follow. We’ll be trying to use this for a more ‘live’ feed of what we’re up to, with brief posts about the pubs we’re visiting as we travel, rather than using it as a sort of extension of the blog.

Our Twitter is the best place for a more candid view of what we’re up to, as well as where we ramble the most, so give it a follow too!