I hadn’t heard of the game until a few months ago. Apparently a friend of a friend in the States came up with the idea, and a few of my friends in London decided to put it to the test in Soho. Then Oxford. Then Islington.

Here’s how it works: 20 or so people meet at a pub in a designated area. Each one puts 20 pounds into one bag and a slip of paper with her or his name on it into another. One by one, the names are drawn and people are put onto teams. The last name drawn is the chicken. Which is to say, it is the person that is lucky enough to get to hang around London in a giant chicken costume.

Why is that person lucky? Because she or he gets to take all of the money, go to a pub, and start drinking through the stash. Meanwhile, all of the other participants split up into their respective teams and go from pub to pub looking for the chicken. The only caveat is that they cannot enter a pub to search for the bird without having a drink.

Once a team finds the chicken, they can start drinking with him or her. If other teams haven’t located the chicken after another 30 minutes to an hour, hints can be dropped until everyone meets up again and enjoys a pint with their feathered friend.

We are all so excited about this game that one of the group even started his own One Giant Chicken blog to share stories and photos from previous rounds.

At this point, you are probably either taking notes so that you can play this game yourself, or getting ready to leave an angry comment about how binge drinking is leading to the degradation of society. Either way, I hope you have gotten some inspiration.

If not—or if you want more—here are a few stories from our three rounds of the game.

The first time we played the One Giant Chicken game, we chose Soho as our location. Our chicken decided to hide in a pub near Piccadilly Circus, and despite the fact that every team searched for her for hours, and one team even went into the pub where she was hiding (she was upstairs), she had to send out hints via social media before we all found her. Still, it was a good time.

The second time we all trekked out to Oxford to play the One Giant Chicken game. Most of the participants had spent time studying at the university, and the chicken was no exception. It was a glorious summer day, and he headed straight to his favorite pub on the river.

One team knew him well enough that they went directly to the pub where he had stationed himself, taunting the rest of us with texts, tweets, and photos until we found him. Once we did, we all enjoyed Pimm’s on the terrace before heading back to London.

Our third round of the game was last weekend in Islington. The chicken headed to a cozy pub with a fireplace to wait for us to find him. Three pubs later, we received a cryptic clue via social media—”What’s that? you can’t find me? Crimea river.”—and put our not-so-useless-anymore liberal arts degrees to work to find him at The Florence (…because Florence Nightingale was famous for her nursing work in the Crimean War).

We spent the rest of the evening swapping stories with the other team that found the chicken and sending hints to the last team—some of them quality, some of them misleading—until they found us and toasted to the bird.

After three rounds of the game, we have learned a few lessons. Namely, limit the number of pubs in the boundary to around 30 or 40, pace yourself on the drinks (half pints of shandy are perfect for lightweights), and make sure you play in an area that people know well but not too well.

Now that we’ve perfected the strategy, I would like to share the One Giant Chicken game with you. Buy a chicken costume. Tell your friends. Be clever. Be safe. And most importantly, have fun. You’re wearing a big yellow bird costume, after all.

Charles Dodgson—aka Lewis Carroll—the author of the book, was a tutor at Christ Church college at Oxford University when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. The dean of the college had a daughter named Alice Liddell, who served as Carroll’s inspiration for the protagonist of his story.

But there’s more to Alice in Wonderland’s Oxford connection than just the basics, and when VisitEngland invited me out for an Alice-inspired day trip from London, I looked forward to learning more.

We traveled to Oxford in the morning and went straight to Christ Church college. There we took a tour of the cathedral, which was home to some great Alice highlights. One was a garden with a green door that later become the White Rabbit’s door. Behind it was a large tree that served as the inspiration for the Cheshire Cat’s favorite place to flash its signature smile.

Inside the cathedral was a stained glass window depicting the story of Oxford’s patron saint, Frideswide. One of the windows showed her setting up a treacle well in nearby Binsey. That same well served as the model for the treacle well in Alice in Wonderland.

But it wasn’t all fiction in the cathedral. There were also some real Alice stories to be discovered there. One stemmed from a bust of Queen Victoria’s son Leopold, who lived with Alice Liddell’s family when he attended Oxford University.

Rumor had it that Leopold and Alice fell in love, but were prevented from marrying. That didn’t keep them from naming their children after one another, though. The proof was shown on a war memorial plaque outside of the cathedral that bore Alice’s son’s name.

Leaving the church, we continued our Alice in Wonderland tour of Oxford with a trip to the Old Sheep Shop, an Alice-themed gift shop that sold everything from figurines to pencil erasers that featured all of the characters in the book.

After stopping at the shop, we had a quick lunch at the Macdonald Randolph Hotel in Oxford and then made our way to the Museum of Natural History. There we met another character from Carroll’s story: the Dodo.

Long extinct, the real dodo bird appeared in the museum in taxidermy form. Near it was a case with taxidermy versions of other characters in the book, including a white rabbit holding a pocket watch.

Speaking of the characters, our next stop was at the famous Bodleian Library, which had a small exhibition displaying various editions of Alice in Wonderland with illustrations by numerous artists.

From there we continued to another museum, this one called the Story Museum. It was a a great place for interactive learning, and had an entire room dedicated to an exhibition about Alice in Wonderland.

Various artists had been commissioned to illustrate scenes from the book, and in one corner was an old Alice-themed card game. The walls were covered with teacup paintings, and the lights above us were also shaped like teacups.

In a nearby room there was a Mad Hatter tea party set up, complete with hats hanging above chairs so that we could pose for photos with various headpieces on.

Tearing ourselves away from the Story Museum, we walked through some pedestrianized shopping streets and made our way to the Malmaison hotel in Oxford. The hotel, which was housed in a former prison, was where I stayed on my last overnight trip to Oxford.

This time we weren’t staying the night, though. We were at the hotel for afternoon tea and millinery.

The Malmaison’s upstairs function room had been transformed into a real Mad Hatter tea party, complete with milliner Katherine Elizabeth, a London-based hat designer who taught us how to make our own head pieces.

We spent the next two hours enjoying cake and scones while fashioning fascinators out of felt, feathers, and everything else we could find in Katherine’s hat boxes. It was all good fun, and the end result was a pleasantly full feeling and a fascinator that didn’t look half bad (a friend of mine even wore it to Goodwood last week!).

It was a great way to end our Alice in Wonderland day trip to Oxford. As we traveled home to London, we drifted off to sleep dreaming of white rabbits, dodos, and Mad Hatters in beautiful hats. If my affinity for Alice hadn’t been strong before, it was certainly cemented then.

It was an ambitious itinerary. The 12-hour tour from London left Victoria Coach Station at 8:30am and wasn’t scheduled to return until 8pm. There were three major stops on the trip and a fourth for lunch. I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.

That was party because I’m not a big fan of organized tours. I find that group travel puts frustrating limits on my freedom and that tour guides put me in a coma of boredom. When several of the 27 other people on the tour held up our departure by making last-nanosecond trips to the bathrooms and coffee shops, I had a feeling I was in for an arduous adventure.

However, shortly after we departed, our guide, Alan, welcomed us on board and entertained us with some tantalizing tales about London. Despite my misgivings, I found myself cracking a smile. His style was far from the dry recitation of historical hodgepodge that characterized most tour guides, and I appreciated it.

Alan’s anecdotes made the two hour drive from London to Warwick Castle pass by quickly. We arrived in Warwick around 10:30am and had the next hour-and-a-half to explore the castle. The best part for me was that we were able to explore it on our own.

I took off down the path to the fortress, which was conceived in the 10th century and built up over the next few. I stopped at the rose garden and the historic mill, headed across the idyllic River Avon, and visited the birds of prey. Afterwards I entered the castle walls and climbed up to the top of the towers. The views were stunning.

From there I walked through an exhibition about castle life. Warwick Castle is owned by the same group that owns London’s most overpriced tourist attraction, Madame Tussauds, so naturally it was heavy on the human replicas and unnecessary glamorization of menial chores like mending underwear.

Still, the small exhibitions about the involvement of Richard III and other important personages were pleasantly informative for my inner history nerd and Shakespeare fan.

Speaking of whom, we departed Warwick Castle at noon and headed to the birthplace of Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is worth noting that we actually departed on schedule, too, which was the first time in all of my organized day trip experiences that that has happened. I was happy.

We arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon after a short drive. Skipping the queue at the entrance to Skakespeare’s birthplace, we filed into the small home on Henley Street to see the bard’s abode. It was crowded, but I slowly made my way through the dining room, living room, bedrooms, kitchen, and other parts of the house. It was large for its time, and there were several exhibitions about Shakespeare and his home along the way.

After the visit, I had about 30 minutes to explore the town. I started by walking down to the river and past the theatre where I had seen my friend in Romeo and Juliet on my last visit to Stratford-upon-Avon.

I also walked around the main shopping streets, which were filled with restaurants, pubs, tea rooms, high street shops, and boutiques. I was more interested in the facades of the beautiful historic buildings than their contents, and ran through the rain to see as much of the town as I could before heading back to the bus.

Once there, we had another on-time departure. Our driver, Keith, drove us into the countryside for lunch at a place called the White Hart pub in the Cotswolds. It was around 2:30pm by the time we got there, and I was famished. I thought it would have made more sense to stop for lunch before traveling to Stratford-upon-Avon, but I enjoyed the mushroom stroganoff and conversation with the others at my table all the same.

After lunch we drove through the idyllic Cotswolds as Alan entertained us with stories about thatched-roof cottages and pointed out everything from deer and llamas to a witch’s house.

An hour later we arrived in Oxford. The bus dropped us off right outside of Christ Church, the college that is famous for its rich history and—let’s be honest—its role as a filming location for the Harry Potter movies.

We waited in a long line to get into the Great Hall, a stunning room lined with portraits of famous personages like John Locke and John Wesley. Sadly, I think I was the only person that was more interested in the actual history of the building than the Harry Potter history. One woman had such an encyclopedic knowledge of the films that she pointed out every minor difference between the actual Christ Church Great Hall and the Hogwarts version.

Once outside the hall, Alan took us on a short tour of Oxford. Starting on the grounds of Christ Church, we walked by Oriel College, where friends of mine had shown me the world’s largest portrait of the queen on my last trip to Oxford.

From there we continued along to Radcliffe Square, past the Bridge of Sighs, and alongside the Sheldonian Theatre, where I had been to my friend’s graduation from Oxford awhile back. The tour ended outside of the Ashmolean Museum, where the bus was scheduled to pick us up 40 minutes later.

I spent the remainder of my visit to Oxford walking through the famous Covered Market and along the bustling shopping streets. At the end of the day, I boarded the bus for the hour’s drive back to London.

We arrived in the city at 7:30pm and the bus made several stops to let us all off as close to our hotels and homes as possible. As predicted, I was completely exhausted from the day and ended up getting 12 hours of sleep that night.

When I woke up the next morning, I had time to reflect on my epic tour. I had enjoyed it a lot more than I had anticipated, owing largely to Alan’s ability to mix history and hilarity, traveling with a good group of bus tour companions, and getting a nice balance of guided tours and free time.

However, I thought that doing a day trip to so many places in just 12 hours was a bit ambitious. I felt rushed in Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford, two cities that deserve an entire day just for themselves.

Then again, not everyone on the tour lives in London and has the luxury of being able to take separate day trips to the Cotswolds, Warwick Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Oxford. If I were only traveling in the UK for a week, I would probably want to pack in as much as I could in every tour. To be honest, I live in the UK and I still feel that way sometimes. Maybe that’s the problem. There is entirely too much to see in this country.

I arrived in town at noon and checked into my hotel, the Malmaison, which had offered me a complimentary stay. It was housed in a former prison in Oxford Castle, and the stunning hallways were reminiscent of the building’s history.

The rooms were not. Far from a barren prison cell, my room was composed of three former chambers plus a fourth for my bathroom. The high windows, thick walls, and arched ceilings were all that remained of past days.

The large bed was covered with a fluffy duvet and tartan pillows. There was a desk and a wardrobe, and a spacious shower and separate tub in the bathroom. I had a TV. I had Internet. It was comfortable in a way that no former prisoner would know, although it felt a bit eerie to think that former prisoners had stayed in the same room.

Downstairs there was a large bar and lounge area as well as a small sitting space in the lobby. In the basement a cellar housed a restaurant where I had lunch with another wedding guest after checking in. We started with a Champagne toast to the wedding couple, which seemed fitting for the occasion.

From there we delved into delicious seared scallops with potato puree and black pudding, Iberico ham with melon balls, lobster tortellinis with baby spinach, and seasonal berry jelly. A bottle of Italian white was just the thing to go with it.

I was full after lunch, which made me glad that I decided to go with an empire waist for my dress for the wedding. I quickly changed into it and ran through the pouring rain to the Oxford Town Hall for the ceremony.

The service took place in a large room with portraits of old dead white men and a rich feeling of history that only buildings in Oxford can have. The grooms walked down the aisle, and the ceremony commenced. It was short and sweet, complete with two readings and the music of a string quartet.

After the documents were signed and the couple was congratulated, I walked to the reception at Rhodes House with some friends. They had gone to Oxford for undergraduate and master’s degrees, and took me into their alma mater, Oriel College, on the way.

I was shown the beautiful interior courtyard of the college, as well as the dining hall. It was gorgeous, and came complete with the world’s largest portrait of the Queen on one side and an equally impressive painting of Edward II on the other. Beneath the king was a 6-foot long ceremonial sword dating back to 1423. The depth of history awed me.

But we couldn’t stay long. Back out in Oxford, we passed the famous Bodleian Library, that round icon of a building, as well as the famous Bridge of Sighs at Hertford College. We came across the Sheldonian theatre, where I had attended my friend’s graduation two summers ago, and a string of other famous buildings.

At last we reached Rhodes House. The beautiful neoclassical building was for the exclusive use of Rhodes Scholars, which one of the grooms was well-rounded enough to be. The interior was steeped in history with book-lined walls and historic inscriptions everywhere. It almost made me want to go back to higher education just to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship.

But for the time being, I was happy to enjoy the wedding reception venue as a guest. The weather had cleared up during the ceremony, so we enjoyed Champagne out in the garden while the couple was busy with photos.

We sat down to dinner shortly thereafter. During the meal we enjoyed several toasts and witnessed many of the guests getting shoed. What does it mean to get shoed? Good question.

Getting shoed is a strange Oxford wedding tradition. Well, it is really an Oxford rowing tradition. Basically, rowers come up with any excuse to make one another (and any other unlucky soul) drink out of each other’s shoes. People were shoed for everything from eating dessert with their utensils or hands (apparently this is taboo for Oriel college rowers) to being Cambridge graduates. It made for a very entertaining dinner.

After we ate there was a cake cutting ceremony at a large table covered in cupcakes that one of our friends had made for the wedding.

That was followed by several hours of dancing to the music of DJ Boogaloo Stu, a favorite of the couple and many of our friends.

When the wedding reception at Rhodes House wrapped up, there was an after party at Camera Club in Oxford. I popped back to my hotel room to grab flip flops, then spent the rest of the night on the dance floor with the other guests.

The next morning I woke up at feeling surprisingly well for a post-wedding day. I headed down to breakfast and had a heaping plate of smoked salmon and creamy scrambled eggs before meeting up with some of the other wedding guests at their hotel.

We drove back to London in the pouring rain, happy to have had such a good time at our friends’ wedding in Oxford, and excited for the post-wedding BBQ scheduled for later that day. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the bank holiday weekend in London recovering from two big days of partying. I needed to. I’m heading to another big wedding near Seattle next weekend.

Nobody does ceremony quite like the medieval European universities. Dating back to the 12th century, Oxford’s graduation was all tradition. All strange-looking robes with streamers flying from the shoulders, all furry hoods, all color-coded stoles. All Latin.

As we sat for two hours on the hard wood benches of the Roman-style D-shaped Sheldonian theatre, we listened to enigmatic Latin chants, watched graduates bow confusedly this way and that, saw the procession leave the theater, and clapped as the graduates returned through the front doors in full academic regalia.

After the ceremony we went to lunch at Brasenose college, my friend’s place of study. “Graduands” and their guests were invited to dine with the principal and his wife, and we were lucky enough to get seats at the head table. I say “lucky” partly because the head table was the best one, but mostly because the head table was the only one that had seats with padded chairs, which was a welcome relief after the hard benches of the theater.

Lunch was a grand affair appropriate to the Harry Potter-like dining hall. With dark wood from floor to ceiling and portraits of lots of old dead white men, it emanated academia from its every mahogany pore. As we dined on John Dory fillets and drank Pinot Noir, we discussed the history of the college, which is celebrating its 500th anniversary this year. Pretty impressive.

After lunch we decided to go punting on the river. All of my previous trips to Oxford and it’s northern rival Cambridge had taken place in the winter, and my dreams of punting had been deferred. But with the sun shining and the season right, this was the perfect day for poling down the river.

Our English friends insisted we pick up some picnic supplies at the covered market in Oxford before punting. It was the proper thing to do. Eager to follow protocol, we accompanied them to the bakery, where we picked up strawberries, bead, brie, and sparkling Elderflower water.

Picnic food in tow, we headed to the river to get our boat. The Isis was chock-a-block with long, skinny vessels of every color, and the chaos of punters and their companions was a bit intimidating. We boarded our boat as delicately as possible given its instability and our being in dresses and heels.

One of our party was a very experienced punter, and he took the helm for the first leg of the journey. The river was gorgeous and the green banks were bursting with flowers, trees, and waterfowl. Several mean-looking swans eyed our strawberries and brie longingly, but we managed to glide past in peace. It was very civilized.

When it was time to turn back, several others took turns digging the long metal pole into the ground and propelling us along the river. We passed giant greenhouses, centuries old churches, painfully beautiful college buildings, and a children’s cricket game. We saw swans, geese, Mallard ducks, and a million tiny water bugs. We relaxed. We enjoyed the sun.

As we alighted, I felt a tiny pang of regret for not taking my turn punting. My skirt and heels didn’t help motivate me, but I probably could have managed with minimal water damage. I suppose I’ll just have to make sure that there’s a “next time” and dress appropriately for the occasion.

She picked me up from the train station and took me on a ‘private’ guided tour of Brasenose College. Even with all of the historic architecture in London, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how beautiful the Oxford University buildings were.

We walked through the courtyard of the college, peeked into the library, and interrupted some sort of luncheon in the dining hall before heading over to one of Oxford’s busy pedestrian streets for a leisurely lunch.

After lunch we had tea in her residence hall and then went for a walk through a nearby park. The air was chilly, but a cluster of friendly daffodils gave us some hope of warmer weather to come.

We wandered from the park to the Eagle and Child Pub (referred to by locals as the Bird and Baby or the Fowl and Fetus) and then spent awhile looking through Greek statuary, Egyptian amulets, and European paintings at The Ashmolean, an art and archeology museum.

In the late afternoon we escaped the cold by doing a little shopping and having more tea, and then I headed back to London at 6:30pm. I wish I could have stayed longer, but it’s nice to know that taking a day trip from London to Oxford is easy. I’m sure I will be back again soon.