Like clockwork, once again my birthday rolled around this year.

Still in the COVID times of changing legislation, we didn't have much appetite for chancing a push all the way down to Maine, or even getting off the island and into the Maritimes. It wasn't the right time to risk getting stuck somewhere because of a new lockdown or the need to quarantine. It was easier to stay in Newfoundland where things were relatively relaxed due to the isolation.

I thought about how I like Central Newfoundland and how Isy and I had a great night pub crawling around a small Newfoundland town one time. Therefore my birthday wish was to go for a pub crawl in Grand Falls-Windsor (GFW) where a lot of little divey bars seem to be hanging on.

We raced out of town on a Saturday evening and got right to it.

Grand Falls-Windsor being the amalgamation of two sprawling towns, I needed to think about our pub schedule strategically to avoid walking for hours and eating up valuable time before many of these places closed at midnight.

Thankfully for this exercise, we could drive directly to the Windsor side of town first since there's only one bar over there¹: Wayne's World Pub & Eatery (2013 StreetView Image, link).

1 - Tezer's Lounge/Bert's was closed at this time and has since reopened.

I've come to ignore the fact that a place calls itself an "eatery" or "pub" in Newfoundland, as many of these places used to serve food and haven't updated their signs, or they're just called a pub because it sounds fancier than bar or lounge.

Wayne's World wasn't a dive though and actually came as advertised. Amidst some of the loudest and thickest accents I've heard during my time in Newfoundland, I scarfed down some pretty good nachos and wings that were better than local chain Wingin' It.

Next time I'm in GFW needing dinner, I'll probably stop by Wayne's World again.

Next up, a 30-minute walk was covered by car in three minutes, as we dropped off our stuff at the Hotel Robin Hood, freshened up, listened to the hip hop channel on the hotel TV, then headed back out.

One of the things I love about these pub/dive crawls is the opportunity to walk around small Newfoundland towns at night and really get a feel for them. Doing this is Port-aux-Basques was special because it's so close to the sea, but it was still fun in GFW with its confusing streets, planned housing, and relatively imposing structures that used to serve different purposes back in times of greater wealth.

Stop #2 was the Grand Falls-Windsor Legion (Branch #12) which is home to an incredible war museum.

Grabbing a couple Dominions from the bar while a wedding roared away off in the main hall, Isy and I were both pretty excited about these fantastic old chairs and the prominent crib board; but then there was just so much to look at on all of the walls and off in little back rooms.

Not only was their a fantastic, classic wooden 1970s bar - plus bar seating area - but there was also a lounge with plushy chairs and couches, all overseen by a dominating Caribou head over a roaring fireplace.

This pub crawl was working to give me more places to stop in Grand Falls-Windsor in the future. The legion was so cool and I loved the feeling of the bar area so much, that I'm always thinking I should stop in and work on BRN for an hour whenever passing through GFW nowadays.

Fifteen minutes away from the Legion, we came to a strange part of Grand Falls-Windsor that I've always liked but which has also frustrated me because I feel like there should be something to ride, lol.

Here on Lincoln Avenue stands a row of older buildings dating to the 1950s, half of them vacant and half of them occupied by O'Reilly's Barber Shop and a Greco. Across the street is a strip plaza, home to a Needs convenience mart, a liquidation store, and a couple bars. There's also the vacant KFC from that Oppy's Diner fiasco.

Next up was The Classic Cue, a dive that we were pretty excited about as we envisioned a cool old pool hall that might be like The Golden Cue in Corner Brook.

The Classic Cue was sadly one of those places that's mostly only open because of the Video Lottery Terminals. I guess the VLT's are much more effective at keeping places open than pool tables these days.

Neither of us being much for VLT's, the Classic Cue still had a couple pool tables, moderately cold beer, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We warmed up after the walk with a couple shots of Southern Comfort too, haha.

Twenty years after Vasovski got an indecisive me a Prairie Fire (tequila + tobasco) shot for my birthday, I'm still getting ridiculous birthday shots.

The Classic Cue clearly saw renovations over the years which limited our love, but the location of an old rear projection big screen TV provided hints as to what would have been the colour scheme years ago.

Driving by these dives in GFW over various years and also reading their reviews on Google, I got the impression a lot of them would be going away just like they slowly are in most of Newfoundland's small towns. The Classic Cue would suffer that fate sometime in the next couple years, as we returned in 2023 to find it permanently closed.

Although it must've been only a temporary closure, as it's now been rebranded as LJ's.

Next up was the place directly next door, which while planning this trip with only 2018 Google StreetView, I thought was either going to be vacant, or another lounge by the name of Mingle's-Talk of the Town. Instead we found a new-age'y brew house.

This was The Taproom Brewpub. They had a nice selection of beers, the bartender was really friendly, and they had the hockey game on TV without having to ask. This wasn't exactly what I was looking for on a dive bar crawl, even if it was a place I'd randomly stop at on a normal day.

In fact, we stopped by nine months later following an appointment in GFW. With it being such a nice day, thoughts of a pint on their hilarious strip mall plaza patio came to mind.

It was great to sit out amongst some rough-and-tumble commercial buildings in a unrefined part of a blue collar Newfoundland town. Speaking of blue collar, another bar on this tour could've been the union hall for mill workers just up the road from here. Known as Club 63, unfortunately it closed and the building was torn down soon after the mill shuttered in 2009.

Next up was the dive I was easily the most excited for: Jimi-Jaks Inn & Pub.

This place is so enticing that I've actually spent a decade of Grand Falls-Windsor visits sizing up and trying to work up the gusto to go inside. We're not even talking about modern times of wanting to take a chance on any random dive - this place looked interesting enough that back around 2011, I was sitting in my parked car trying to get over my awkwardness to just go inside for a drink.

I mean, it was built prior to 1909. There's a chance it's the oldest building in Grand Falls-Windsor!

Alas, I clearly should have got over my awkwardness and went in all those years ago. It was closed this night and while I wondered if it was just because it was getting late, their last social media post is from August 2020 and online it's marked as permanently closed.

So we went across the street to Barney's, where I'd had some chili cheese fries and a beer on a previous trip, but I figured Isy should check it off since it's an impressive stone building that used to be the Knights of Columbus headquarters. This also provides an interesting interior as they retained some of the feel of a Knight of Columbus hall.

The only problem was that they were closing. We moved along.

We were getting to that point in the night where it seemed like walking to the next place might not yield anything as everything could be closed.

Boy were we wrong about Kelly's Pub¹.

Now this was still Covid times. It was still alarming to be amongst a crowd of people, especially when they were entirely strangers. So take that fact and add it to the nervousness of when you first open a bar door and have no idea what's to come. Especially as we were walking up and three girls stumbled out amongst the blaring Avril Lavigne and gave us the stank eye.

Opening the door, Kelly's was packed with people.

Taking a breath, Isy said she'd go grab a table and I'd grab a beer. I've been in this situation before and one thing is just finding a table and settling in, as most of the people are intoxicated and know each other, so it's easy to sit back, observe and get comfortable.

Paying for my beer and Isy's drink, it came to $9.50 and the boozehound sitting at the bar grabbed my two quarters and then made it disappear behind my ear. And then another slight of hand trick. And then another.

Oh okay, so we have some jokers here.

1 - screenshot, streetview.

Back at the table, Isy barely took a breath before a guy approached her and while she may have thought he was coming to chat her up, he instead excitedly told her that I was the most beautiful man in the whole bar!

Unknowingly returning with our drinks, this guy and his buddies huddled around my circular table while Isy was cast aside. They asked if we knew so-and-so from Corner Brook, "no", "okay how about so-and-so?" "no" - this went on until they concluded that we must be narcs instead of just being bad with names (Isy) or unpopular (me). I had to offer up the two people I know from Grand Falls-Windsor and that was enough to convince them we weren't narcs.

Now it was back to my beauty. The one guy kept going on about how I looked like "the mermaid dude! Jason Moana, yeah! Jason Moana! Moana! The guy with the hair!" until his friend let him know "Jason Momoa!" and not Jason Moana. Another guy excitedly told me how I looked like some Jose De La something from UFC. Another said I looked like a guy from GTA V. The ringleader guy then went on about how I need to come out with him to wheel, and how the wheeling would be so good if I came along.

All the while, the one guy's nose started bleeding and I was also offered some white stuff, which flattered me but I had to decline. That was followed by offers of how we need to go back to buddy's cabin on some mountain (Mount Peyton maybe?) and I pictured a fun bomb down some woods road to a weird cabin.

Except that we needed to get the fuck out of here. Not looking to go on a multi-day bender, Isy went to the washroom and as she popped back out, I excused myself and we hurried out the back door.

Cutting through the back of the parking lot and over to the parking lot of Barney's, Isy was annoyed with how four men had come over and just obsessed over my beauty and carried on about how I looked like an actor, an MMA fighter, or a cool guy from a video game, all while paying her no attention at all. I had to tell her that I transcend sexual preference, that even heterosexual guys struggle to contain themselves around me. I explained that I'm a lot like Prince in that way.

Back at the Robin Hood Inn, it was a fun coincidence that we stayed at this motel during our Grand Falls-Windsor dive bar tour as this used to be home to one of the great GFW dive bars. Gathering some of this update's information from this fantastic article about the history of bars, pubs, lounges, clubs and taverns of GFW, it states that there used to be quite the bar at the back of our motel:

"People that I know say that the Carsans was the greatest bar since Cheers. Some of their wives refer to it as a dive and curse its existence."

This bar operated from 1975 until sometime in the 1990s. It was in 1990 that The Carsans Hotel was bought by one Graham Hutchinson of Nottingham England, who renamed the place to Ye Olde Robin Hood Inn and let the bar eventually die off. Booourns.

The next morning we went over to the Cromer Ave fast food/big box district, as there's another bar located over here by the name of the Club 99 Lounge. Due to its location though, it got squeezed out of our itinerary last night.

I was only going to take a picture of the Club 99 exterior, but then this neighbouring building grabbed my attention.

It was only when I got home and looked at Google StreetView that I discovered it used to be a Canadian Tire Bicycle Shop!? A separate standalone bike shop behind/beside a Canadian Tire? Was this a thing anywhere else?

I asked my friend Steven Twodamncute who has a pretty good memory for these type of things, and he said it definitely wasn't a thing in Windsor Ontario and that he's "been to a lot of Canadian Tires and never seen it ever." Googling "Canadian Tire Bicycle Shop" doesn't bring up any results either.

The bike shop was closed by the time of the October 2018 StreetView. They closed the old Canadian Tire next door (to the left in the above picture) on February 23^rd, 2019.

I was surprised by how easily I was able to pop inside, but since I hadn't planned on this, Isy was a total sitting duck parked right out front on busy Cromer Ave. In addition, the power was still on. Not wanting to run out with an alarm going off while she casually looked at her phone, I only took a quick look and headed back outside.

I always thought this would be a great indoor riding spot to get away from winter with the power on and hopefully no alarms, but we ended up having a winter where I got a fair amount of riding in, I was travelling to the mainland, and I still had responsibilities to watch Kingsley on Saturdays. In addition, there really wasn't a great way to sneak a bike into this property without 100 cars driven by small town drivers, wondering why the hell an unfamiliar grown man is carrying a bmx to the back of an abandoned building in January.

I guess I could have told them I was looking for the Canadian Tire Bicycle Shop.

Next up, we went over to the Windsor side of town where I'd found an actual new BMX spot within three hours of where I live! Living in Western Newfoundland, it would be almost impossible to do that for every birthday!

This gave me a feeling of happiness and melancholy at the same time. I can't believe I live somewhere where I know and have exhausted every BMX spot within three hours. And not just the good spots like the street quarterpipes of the Bell Alliant Building or that step/ledge in Deer Lake, we're talking about spots with quality grades all the way down to little two-stair Philly step/blocks like this.

That being said, I'm looking forward to the day I get to ride this thing again.

Unable to reach anyone in Botwood or Lewisporte to check in on renting the ice at their arenas, I saw that the Windsor Arena in Grand Falls-Windsor had an open skate this Sunday afternoon.

Pulling into the parking lot and struggling to find a spot, this had to be the most well-attended open skate in the history of arenas. How was the fire marshall not shutting this down?

Isy and I had further questions, but we still grabbed our skates and approached the door before seeing how many fans were milling about.

There was a regional girl's hockey tournament going on, and as so often happens in Newfoundland, there wasn't a social media post or anything to say that the open skate was cancelled.

This was fortuitous though as I never realized Windsor Arena was actually interesting and different. I wasn't really thinking when I just assumed it was one of the typical "used to be an outdoor rink until they built a plain structure around it" Newfoundland arenas, but of course Grand Falls-Windsor with all of its history and wealth, would have a slightly more interesting arena. Heck, they still do things a lot better than similar Newfoundland towns to this day.

Sitting down on the wooden grandstands and enjoying what was left of the second period, once the intermission hit, we decided to head east.

Continue to Part 2...