skate journal: Omaha park and the infamous Dollar Store (Aug 7, 2009)
After a round of the worst golf imaginable by me with my father in law, Ollie and I headed out to the Omaha skatepark in some 95 degree heat to meet Joe and Fuzzy. In the past Ollie has been super shy around Joe or anyone when skateboarding. This time he loosened up a bit and skated the whole time. He had fun cruising around and did some little roll-outs and roll-ins. The best thing he did though was ride down this bank and navigate the narrow curb onto the bench. So rad. He of course backed it up by ollie’ing off the bench. I didn’t skate too hard at the park. Mostly just cruised around and made sure Ollie wasn’t going to be nailed by a biker or flyout kids. Joe and Fuzzy were skating hard and ripping. I saw Joe do a textbook back 50 front 180 out on the ledge. Oh, crap, I should mention that Joe pink slipped me on a game of SKATE on the little quarterpipe in the snakerun. I gotta learn to skate other tranny then Rampy.After awhile we left to bring Ollie home for dinner. Joe, Fuzzy and I headed out to Chipotle and got our Burrito on before going to the infamous Dollar Store bank to ledge. I only filmed at it before when Riley, Bernie and Greg rattled off trick after trick. It was insanely hard to skate. I tried back 50s for awhile, but gave up and went front 50. Fuzzy had landed front 50 and front 5-0 already. Joe was trying to relive the dream and do another front rock. Fuzzy was trying front tails, I was still working on front 50 and Joe was working on front rock when we decided to bet some beer. First one to land their trick didn’t have to buy beer. The last person to land their trick had to buy the first pitcher, the second person the 2nd pitcher. Fuzzy got the front tail real quick like. I got the front 50 second leaving Joe to get his front rock which he eventually did. And it was a good one too. Landing the front 50 was probably one of the funnest tricks I’ve ever done on a skateboard. That was a tall loading dock to be coming into that tranny for me. Took a few tries to commit, but when I did it was so insanely fun. I worked on back 50s for awhile, but never got too close. We were all covered in sweat. Our shirts were so wet that they were dripping. It was dark by the time we left, but we stopped at this weird ledge into bank spot and checked it out. We got out of the car and Joe puked. Guess that’s how hot it was and we skated hard. It wasn’t the gnarliest setup but the darkness made it seem gnarly. Fuzzy killed it again. Front 50 into the gnar. Manual. And a heelflip. Sick. I did a slow and lame front tail into it and also manualed the mellower part. Joe skated it too even though he had just puked like crazy.Lastly we played a bad game of SKATE. I think I won, but it wasn’t one of those bragging rights games. It went on too long and no one landed much. Fun day though. The bank spots were fun. It’s crazy how you can actually have fun just trying tricks. I really didn’t think I would ever get that front 50 on the bank to ledge. I was pretty happy just getting onto that thing. Landing it was seriously mind blowing to me. One of my favorite tricks of all time. I can’t believe that Bernie got kickflip 5-0 on it second try (1:18). That is ridiculous.