Location share your way to the perfect Birthday celebration

24 guests, no stress, no extra expense.

Mar 27, 2025

Happy Birthday to me!

As you know, I enjoyed yet another birthday last week, and am very happy to report that the celebrations went off without a hitch! 🥳

In fact, as the day started to take shape and then played out, I have never felt more smug about ‘throwing a party’ for me plus 24 friends.

Party planning stress

Usually the thought of organising a gathering for that many people would make me quite stressful.

Either you have to throw open your own doors for a considerable amount of mess and catering, or you have to find a restaurant that has maybe two tables of 12… or perhaps go down the route of reserving the ‘back room’ in a pub etc, which will have a minimum spend, if not a hire charge.

Either which way, it’s a lot of fuss and bother, and leads you to really care if people turn up or not, as you have either overspent or chosen somewhere to accommodate the number of people who originally said they were up for it, but as you get nearer the time a few inevitably drop out.

It’s not about you, it’s about me!

The thing is, I’ve had a lot of birthdays, I have over-catered and under-catered, pushed the boat out and brought it back in again, and now I’m done with all that, I wanted a birth’day’ of friends, food and drink, with none of the hassle.

And that’s exactly what happened.

In fact, it went so well, I’m desperate to share it with you, so you can organise many a stress-free get together in the future.

The modern pub crawl

The day was based around a traditional pub crawl, i.e. we moved from one venue to the next along a planned route starting with lunch at the first venue.

But the fabulous thing about doing one of these events in the modern era is that we could share our live location via WhatsApp, so people could just pop in and out as it suited them, just joining us wherever we happened to be.

There was no need to commit to the whole afternoon, or even the lunch.

Apart from the kick-off time, there was no schedule, no timetable to keep to, just an easy breezy day.

A quick ‘How-To’ for those who aren’t familiar with location sharing in WhatsApp

Create the Group as usual.
Go to post a message, but instead of typing, select the ‘+’ on the left, choose ‘Location’.
Click on ‘Share live location’, select how long you want to share it for.

That’s it, so simple, and then anyone in the group can see where you are and come and find you!

Back to the birthday celebrations…

From my perspective it was the best of all worlds, as it required so little organisation: book a table/s at the starting pub, pick a route (5 more pubs) and set-up a WhatsApp group for those who had shown interest… with no compromise on the number of people who could attend.

It was such a lovely day for me, moving around town and bumping into my mates all day long!

Originally I thought there would be about 8-12 of us at various parts of the day, but in the end, I was joined by 24 of my friends and family, which is a number that far exceeded my expectation… mainly I think because it was so easy for them to attend!

Who knows, they may have timed it in with some errands they needed to run in town anyway, I don’t care why, it was lovely to see so many!

The amount of time I spent chatting to them all was the same as if we had all been in the same room at the same time, but without the hassle of housing us all together!

So why not give it a go for your next birthday, perhaps the same theory but a different theme, a Cake Crawl perhaps?

Or a Looooooong Lunch where you have one small dish/course/cake/cheeseboard in each, the possibilities are endless!

I cannot recommend it enough! 👏

K8x

PS: A very special thank you to all those who made it such a special day and bought me a birthday drink, both IRL and virtually! 😘