I arrived in Windsor in the morning and it wasn't long before I was hanging out with Donnie & Steve. Trying to figure out what to do this Friday, we sometimes rent a room at this seedy motel over in the West End and figured that would make a good plan for tonight.

It's not like the motel has bedbugs or anything, and for $50 it makes for a fun spot to split the cost between 3-5 people and hangout in different and chill quarters.

Where I've always got the same room other times, this time they decided to give us one with a kitchenette. And boy did this room make the Travellers Choice feel much more grimy than usual, with mismatched kitchen furniture and a fridge that they clearly picked up from a police auction.

Still no bedbugs though!

Lounging on the couch and turning on the TV, I lasted about 15 minutes before breaking out my big surprise.

Back in Vermont, Isy and I made sure to only drink 3 of the 6 Zimas since I knew how well they'd go over at Christmas. Once back in Newfoundland, clearly I had to carefully wrap each bottle in a t-shirt and pack them into my airplane bicycle travel bag for the flight.

Nothing like sucking back a couple Zimas with the boys at the Travellers Choice.

The joke of the night, like Extreme Couponing in Barrie, became the Tac-Cam. Apparently Donnie's Mom thought this would make a good gift as he likes cameras, haha.

4 days later, a different TacCam infomercial came on while I was at my aunt's for Christmas festivities. TacCam was clearly paying to be seen by last minute shoppers.

Normally we don't actually stay at this grimy motel, but after going to a few drinking establishments and it nearing night's end, Donnie figured that maybe I'd rather stay here than atop the dog bed on his floor again (he still hadn't bought me a replacement air mattress, smdh.)

The motel bed seemed fine, so obviously I was going to pick human bed over dog bed.

Entering the room and with D-Spice already gone, I looked out on the courtyard one last time and realized our room's front window had a bullet hole, lol.

The funny thing is the next morning I'd regret staying here not because of crime, but because Donnie's missus had cello lessons in the morning and the initial expectation was that her Texan digital cello teacher was going to have to see a shirtless fat guy sleeping on a dog bed in the background. I'm really sad I didn't make that happen.

Fast forward a couple of days and I rode the Tunnel Bus over to the States for a friend's birthday. He was going to be busy for a few hours, but I was dying to get over to Detroit where I've been enjoying my solo walkabouts on recent trips home.

I took the time to check out the Detroit Saturday Night Building, which had been threatened with demolition, but thankfully given a reprieve.

Except Detroit being Detroit, this reprieve only lasted about a year and this building was demolished in November of 2019. The Fort Shelby Hotel said the building needed to go in order to provide 12 whole parking spaces as management was apparently having trouble selling their condos and paying off their debts without dedicated parking spaces.

We had a quiet afternoon and dinner, but afterwards we had drinks at Donovan's, which I just so happened to conveniently photograph earlier in the day.

Anyone who's reading this from BR or Windsor has definitely passed Donovan's. Taking the Ambassador Bridge, as long as you don't go directly on the interstate afterwards, you would head right pass this place as you meet Vernor West and speed off towards either Mexicantown or the train station.

I was a big fan of Donovan's.

For all of the years I've looked over and thought this bar looked boring and unappealing, the inside was cool and divey, with a good vibe and crowd.

Plus they had the best security cameras I've ever seen.

We were able to keep a good, HD eye on the car outside.

After Donovan's, we cut across town to Kelly's Bar in Hamtramck.

This was another place I'd never been, although Kelly's didn't have a boring exterior like Donovan's. It's in an old Hamtramck-style house, with a great sign and classic corner entryway under a street lamp.

The washroom at Kelly's was the most graffitied I'd ever seen.

How's that meme go about not having to worry about what's in the vaccine?

My friend dropped me off at his partly-renovated house since there was now a bed there and the heating system had been installed. As he locked me inside and drove away, it was an interesting experience to stand in the second floor of this giant, empty house, in one of those Detroit neighbourhoods that's perfectly captured by Danny Brown, "it goes field-field-house-field-abandoned house-field".

I had a beer left over, so I cracked that and sat by the window for a bit, drinking it all in.

The next morning my friend had somewhere to be, which left me again on my own, but this time within walking distance of Mexicantown instead of right downtown.

Waking up and being able to walk to Colombo's Coney Island for a chili cheese breakfast omelette and coffee? Shiiiiiiiiit.

I sat here and let a dumb grin take over my face, eating up this feeling of living in Mexicantown and simply having these things available without having to deal with oceans or border guards.

A couple days later, Donnie & I headed to Leamington to check out their new $350,000 skatepark. It's funny because I usually use Leamington as the comparable town when describing the size of Corner Brook to Ontarioans, except we definitely don't have a $350,000 skatepark.

We do have a $19.6-million city hall though! Stupid Leamington's city hall was only $9.8 million. Pfft!

Anyway, let's get back to the Leamington park. One hilarious thing was when Donnie said, "let's see who can grind the rail, then the ledge, then the rail, then the ledge first...but wait, some of those are opposite for you."

I then waved him off and threw in two opposite grinds as I landed it first try, lol.

One not so hilarious thing was this night when I went to a getogether with the gamers I used to hang out with, and LePine excitedly told me about how he's going to be a father. I thought it would be funny to reply, "oh yeah? Well I rode the new Leamington skatepark today!" The joke missed. It seems like you should simply congratulate people when they tell you about making children.

I wrapped up 2018 by heading down to Lighthouse Cove and checking out the Thames River Range Rear Lighthouse on December 31st.

In hindsight, this was sort of nice. And nowadays with how I'm always looking for a new New Years Eve tradition, maybe a road trip to a new lighthouse is the solution.

I also went over to the other side of the canal and checked out the base of the Thames River Lighthouse, which I'd never done before.

New Years Eve 2018 was pretty chill and uneventful, although I appreciated Donnie making himself available and wanting to hang out. We went down to the river and listened to the gunfire over in Detroit again, then went downtown to watch the gong show of NYE drunkards, but ended up there a bit early and instead went down to The Dugout to grab a pint and kill some time.

I thought we were in the Honest Lawyer space that I hadn't been inside in 15 years, but apparently these are two different spaces, right next to each other.

Anyway, we eventually made it back to Donnie's and watched these 15 minute videos where the guy records himself driving around Corner Brook; before going to bed around 5 or 530.

The next day we took advantage of it being a holiday to check out some old train cars.

These trains used to bring soda ash to a facility that we had explored previously.

While we found these cars somewhat cool regardless, it would have been even better if we knew that tie-in at the time.

Afterwards we celebrated our leet explore with chicken balls and soo guy in Amherstburg at the Ruby King. There's a few Google reviews that mention this place needing renovations, but frig that, we all loved the interior.

Into the New Year, I kept going to Stoney Point for some reason and along the way thought it was a great idea to grind the top of the coping monster from flat - which is a great idea, as long as you commit to it.

Instead, I changed my mind as soon as I pulled up my front tire, so I got about 12 inches of air, which was not enough to get my foot or even my knee on top of the ledge to push myself away from it. I landed thigh first on the ledge, with the harsh angle iron edge driving right into the muscle on the side of my leg.

I was in a lot of pain and the session was over. I rushed over to the truck and got out of Stoney Point, although it didn't feel like anything had broken or tore inside of me. There wasn't any blood either.

My thigh felt funny, but I didn't think it was anything more than a deep bruise. The next day I was scheduled to go ride with Donnie, which we did and my leg only felt a bit strange.

Speaking of riding, we may not have been hitting many buildings or weird bars on this trip home, but man was there a lot of riding. Which may not make for good website updates, but it was good in real life.

As for my thigh, it would continue to fill up with blood, but only to a certain extent. It looked a lot like a waterbed and eventually back in Newfoundland I found out that I tore my muscle sheath. So the sheath would bleed and try to repair itself, but the blood wouldn't coagulate and it would just sit there on the side of my thigh. My doctor tried draining it and applying pressure to prevent it from refilling, but after it kept filling back up, he eventually said he couldn't drain it anymore for risk of infection.

The final weird thing was that the non-draining solution was that my body would eventually reabsorb the old blood in 8-12 weeks time. Which it did right around 9 weeks time.

Another good thing about all this riding was that it annoyed Donnie into fixing my bike. Just by having it in his apartment, he kept obsessing over my bike and getting irritated with its similarity to an old shopping cart that Bubbles would have pulled out of a ravine.

You see, I deal with problems the right way. I avoid braking around police while leaving my tail light out for months. I use Mozilla on my phone to access facebook messenger instead of figuring out my app store password to download Messenger. I'll lug a heavy garbage can with frozen trash water for months instead of putting it out in the sun to melt. On the other hand, Donnie's a weirdo and living like this bothers him, as he prefers to waste time and fix things that already have perfectly fine solutions.

And while it must be annoying to date him or live with him, it's great being his bike riding friend now that I know he'll fix up my bike. Over the matter of a few hours, he tightened and put Loctite on my loose sprocket, fixed the fact that my crank arms were on the wrong side, replaced 12-15 broken spokes, reassembled the loose headset where I put in the bearing race even though I have a bearing race built into my forks, and even pulled off all of the duct tape to replace my tattered seat.

What a score! I would have done none of this on my own and it was wild how solid my bike felt afterwards.

After riding downtown Windsor, including that bank to tractor trailer at Food Basics, I headed over to Detroit for a bonfire with Sloop and Nail.

Nailhed was going to break out more of the 1738 cognac from the summer, which meant we had to get ice from the local liquor store...and it came in an individual ziploc bag?

Detroit liquor stores are the best.

The bonfire was splendid, but I had to get back to Newfoundland earlier that I had in years.

And you know how that went.

So much snow you need a broom.