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Camrose Crawl 2006

Ah yes, tis one of the last weekends in December. And this can only mean that it is time for that annual rite of passage of drinking -- the Camrose Crawl.

Now, to be honest, I dread this time of year. You cannot understand the mental and physical training and preperation it takes to will yourself to drink for nearly 9 hours straight in a foreign city. The unfamiliarity of the surroundings, coupled with the requirement to spend copious amounts of money, and then dealing with the inevitable puking, cold shakes, fever, night sweats, butter butt, beer farts, and side-splitting headache the next day means that one doesn't necessarily approach the Camrose Crawl lightly.

But similar to how Sir Lancelot and the entire Knights of the Round table would react when the guantlet is thrown down issuing the challenge of the Camrose Crawl, I bend over, pick up that metal glove off of the cold and unforgiving floor, and say, "Excuse me Sir...I think you have dropped this".

The first bar of the evening is located in the luxurious confines of the Alice Hotel. The bar is called the Pump House and is every bit as shitty as you can possibly imagine. As Greg's DAD drops us off out front -- seriously, what are we, in HIGHSCHOOL here? -- we rub our hands in gleeful anticipation of the commencement of the evenings shenanigans. However, what happens next I am NOT prepared for.

As we enter the bar, this solid wall of cigarette smoke attacks us like wild hyenas on a baby gazelle in the plains of Africa. Cocksucking son of a bitch -- Camrose STILL hasn't implemented a no-smoking ban and it preys on our ears, eyes, and throat like Chad's mom preys on young virile men -- with reckless abandon. I seriously contemplate having to leave it stings that bad. But we suck it up and order our first jugs of the evening, pour ourselves a glass of that golden liquid nectar which is beer and head over to the pool table. All eyes are on us as we definately look out of place at the bar. For one, we smell nice. Secondly, we are young, and thirdly we have all our teeth and there are no scars on our faces. But we pay no attention to the leering men and women and proceed about our business.

The nice thing (if you can call it that) about the Alice Hotel is that it has a "shot wheel", where you get to spin the wheel and whatever shot the wheel stops on, that's what you get. I hit the mother load and get "Your Choice"...so I order a tasty sounding shot called Mud Pie. The waitress starts to pour the shot. Let's see...okay, vodka. And then what's this? Coffee Liquer? Dammit...this is just a black russian in a shot glass! Oh well, down the hatch it goes. Between boozing, pool, and Big Buck Hunter (which Jody and I SWEAR was broken 'cause we are elite video game hunters and still didn't bring down one buck), the hour goes by really quickly and all to soon we have to go to our next destination.


As we pile out of the bar, there happens to be a cop car parked out front. Naturally, we stop to pose for pictures...so I do the classic spread eagle, bent over the cop car hands above my head pose.


After a short walk (as in, literally seconds), we are at the Windsor Hotel and their attached bar called the Windsor Hotel Bar (woah...don't strain yourself on coming up with a cool sounding name guys). The Windsor continues to be my favorite stop on the Camrose Crawl, mainly because the beer is SO cheap ($7 a pitcher) and because they have shuffle board! On the down side, the place has NEVER (and I mean never) been updated in the entire time the bar has been in existence. Upon entering the bar, Craig-o and I immediately beeline for the shuffle board table and we pair up into teams to play shuffle board.

If you've never played shuffleboard, you are missing out. Think curling, but not on ice and you can play it one-handed and hammered. Basically you have 4 pucks and you push them from one end to the other, closest to the end without the puck falling off wins a certain number of points. But an additional twist is that you have to bounce the pucks off of a rubber bumper that is halfway down the table. Basically it's just a lot of fun.

The other thing about the Windsor hotel is the fact that they have nearly ever single possible stuffed animal head you can think of on the wall. In particular, over the shuffboard table, is a stuffed quail, deer, and moose head. While we are playing the game, I scoop up some salt into my hand and try to feed it to the stuffed deer head -- but I guess the deer wasn't hungry cause he didn't eat it.

After I lose the game (what did you expect, I was trying to convince a stuffed deer head to eat shuffleboard salt -- my head wasn't exactly in the game?) I sit down with Jody and we talk about the stuffed animal heads. Jody remarks "Wouldn't it be weird if these animals were all alive, and this was the Flintstones, and they are just standing outside the building sticking their heads through holes in the wall 'cause hey, it's an easy way to make a living"? Uh....okay, Jody...have another one. But not to be outdone, I tell Craig to rip the quail off the wall and throw it into the air and tell it to fly to freedom my little feathered friend!

Wow...it's only the second bar and we're THIS hammered already?

The only other remarkable aspect of the Windsor is the fact that they have a t.v. that was made likely in the 70's, and it's recessed into the wall, almost to be flush with the wood paneling. As the waitress comes by to grab us -- AND grab us another round (hi oh!) -- I ask her where they got that ultra, ultra flat screen T.V. She isn't impressed with the joke.

In between the 9th or 10th pitcher of beer, we get to talking about the cop car and my spread eagle pose. Someone says that it would have been sweet to see that -- well, fortunately, Tyler took a picture of it! So as we're looking at Tylers digital camera, Garth decides that he needs a picture for himself...so he takes a picture of a picture. Not to be outdone, Lindsey also takes a picture of this -- that's right, a picture of a picture of a picture.

Honestly, why they don't make us in charge of anything just baffles me when you consider the amazing ideas we have! Below is a picture of Dale's Liquor store, an inpromptu side stop!

We leave the Windsor all too soon and make the 4 block walk to the next bar -- Scalliwags. Naturally we are practicing our best pirate "Arrrrghs" in anticipation of the pirate-themed bar we're sure to encounter. However, it IS four blocks away -- it may as well be a marathon -- so we stop in at a liquor store to get Boones wine, and a tray of shots, for the walk.

We get into scalliwags and it turns out to be an English Pub / Darts bar (rather than being pirate themed). Damn. But it does have dart boards, and free popcorn, so it's not all the bad. We start to drink (what a surprise) and I have to take my first leak of the night. SO I go into the bathroom and on the cork board where the urinals are it reads "For a good time, call the Camrose BANG BUS at ### - ####" SWEET...I didn't know Camrose had such luxuries. I go to write down the number but don't have a pen, and by the time I get back to my table I forget that I saw the number at all!

The only remarkable events of Scalliwags are as follows.

1. A drink called and ecstasy, or something like that. It looks like a blended smurf and tastes too sweet to have more than one. I, of course, have at least three.

2. We play a darts game called "how far can you sink the dart into the dartboard". I win...but what is most remarkable is that I missed the dart board complete but bury my shaft deep (heh heh heh) into the PLYWOOD backing!

3. We leave the bar and there is ivy growing on the side of the wall. Naturally, I climb it.

Oh yeah, and here's a pretty sweet poster-grope that I snapped. Forgot about this one!

The fourth bar is ABC Dining. That's right, a restaurant. So why were we there? Because its a chinese restaurant and they have karoke! Sadly the karoke machine is broken and Jody and I only get to sing into some reverberating microphones, while Lindsey breaks a table. Granted, there is Jody humping a blow up bottle of booze, but that isn't enough to keep us entertained. We leave shortly.

The bar after the disaster karoke event is Old Cinema. It's actually an old theatre that's been converted to a bar. It's closed when we get there (9:00 pm) but we pound on the doors til they open up. Seriously, that's the first time I've ever OPENED a bar!

The Old Cinema has been in danger of closing for a long time, as know one goes there, and I don't know why! It's the only bar that I know of that has a disco floor!

Not only that, but the bar has $1 highballs -- which is like opening a toy store and letting a kid have WHATEVER the fuck they want! Rye and Rum and Vodka oh my! We start drinking in earnest now, really ramping it up.

(P.S. You should know that as I type this, Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back" is playing on my mp3's and it's bringing me back to the Old Cinema)!

We start with gladiators one after another. We ask the bartender, the one with the huge and perky....uh....eyes....if we can buy her a drink. To say that we got shot down is an understatement. I think that she can barely stand to be there, let alone have to serve us booze. It it was me, I would have HEARTILY accepted, if for no other reason than to have a way to dull the pain of working in that bar. The smell of pot is nearly overpowering, but an intense game of fooseball makes us forget the smell permeates the air.

This is the first bar to have a dancefloor and a DJ, and we take advantage. After we do the call on me dance -- you know the one I'm talking about, no need to repeat it here -- we leave.

Like all soldiers on the front line, we need to fuel up at a mess hall. In this case, that mess hall is 7 - 11! All rural 7 - 11's have chicken and us urban dwellers are SO missing out. But the chicken isn't cheap. There is a total of 12 of us, and I was planning on getting everyone two chicken skewers each. At $5.00 a skewer, that total would have been about $125 -- YIKES! Instead, we get a bucket of sweet delicious chicken for considerably cheaper than that and walk to the next bar -- BPs. And, having JUST finished the last piece of chicken as we walk into BPs, I promptly order a stromboli sandwich...sigh, I even fucking disgust myself sometimes!

But really, everything up to this point has been leading us to Cadillacs, the only actually popular bar on the whole stop! The bar is PACKED like an Indian train. I don't know how many different fire codes are on the book, but this place violated all of them!

Now, after a night of shitty bars, shitty people, and shitty to non-existant music, why do we go here after we reek of booze, sweat and cigarette smoke? It's all about the people (where people = 18 year old high school girls). Sadly, I wish I could say that this is not the reason...but for the most part it is. I mean, yes, the dancing is awesome...but frankly, I get a little tired of the sausage dance circle we have going on and instead prefer to wait on the sidelines just staring at the chicks. I remark to myself that none of them are hotter than Corinna, but really, mere mortal women cannot be compared to her...

We are dancing on the speakers -- yes, you read that right -- when these "I'm still in highschool" girls get up on the speakers as well. They giggle as they try to push us off the speakers with a few well placed hip checks (oh Patty, we needed your skills for retaliation!) and I put up with it for only so long before I turn to one of them and yell, "Look...I know that you think you are being fucking AWESOME, but quit it"). I think she just about started crying!

The night progresses as you think it would. The night winds up with this girl (Ashley) slow dancing with me at the end of the night. She is drunk as fuck, and despite my numerous references to my wife, she has her arms wrapped around me, holding my hand, buying me drinks. (Okay, so only two of the three I hand an issue with -- but can you guess which two?). Fortunately Craig Blair SAVES MY LIFE by dancing with us for the rest of the night.

After the lights come on, we walk back to Greg's parents house to pass out. Along the way, we adapt the classic Bryan Adam's song - Summer of 69 - to suit our purposes. "I got my first real 18, got her at the Camrose Crawl. Played with her til she was wet, was the Camrose Crawl 2006"... I know that there are women reading this blog, and I apologize for the vulgarity...but me not typing these words doesn't make them any less true, and you deserve to know everything that happened!

Upon getting back to Gregs, I spread out my sleeping bag to sleep on the floor. I PRAY that I will make it to the bathroom when the eventual call of nature -- puking -- forces me to my knees to pray to the porcelain gods. I awake some time in the night and run to the bathroom and unleash Montezuma's revenge. Honestly...as wide as my mouth could open was how the puke came out and it did NOT stop. But, after I finally expunge all the poison from my body and pass out, I settle down for a relatively calm sleep (well, if you can describe cans of red bull coursing through your body, making your heart pump a mile a minute as "calm").

We wake up, give our thanks Greg's parents for once again allowing us to stay at their home, and recall all the fabulous tales from the night before.

I can't wait til next year's crawl already...

posted by Team Shawn Michaels @ 5:23 p.m.