skate journal: Valmont area with Ollie
After a long day of watching Ollie play flag football then playing basketball with Ollie I was able to tempt him with skateboarding at Red Curbs since it was raining. But by the time we left it was sunny and dry so we ended up at Valmont area. I had some new shoes. Well, some really old shoes that I’ve worn to work for a year or so. Some Fallen James Hardy Ramblers. I can’t even find a photo of them online anymore. My Lakai’s weren’t dead and I might skate them again, but I had forgotten I needed to shoe goo them again and it was too late to fix them up before skating. Right out of the gates I could tell these shoes sucked. They are fake vulcs and gum sole and they were slippery. Kickflips were weird. We started at this bank area:
Ollie had fun doing body varials and did the best frontside ollie(s) ever. Basically went for a frontside ollie, but didn’t really ollie, stopped, then popped an actual ollie and laughed. Ollie rules. I managed kickflip to fakie, backside flip, fakie flip. Then a line with front 180 over a little curb gap, switch front 180 off a curb, ollie a tiny median, frontside flip on the bank. Then a varial flip fakie and a front shove fakie. Ollie did a few body varials and fakie shove attempts where he rode up normal then body varialed, came to a halt and tried to fakie shove. So awesome.
Next we went over here. Do a trick into this bank, a flatground trick then something on this bank:
Ollie was doing awesome cannonball runs down it, then going for 360 body varial on the bank. He never quite got that. I was going for no comply 180 into the top bank, halfcab flip on flat then nollie tre on the other bank. The halfcab flip proved hard as I kept slipping off the darn grip. Argh. Got kind of close to the whole line.
Last up was this area. In the distance you can see Ollie. He did ollies down the 2 then 180s off the curb. The best front 180s I’ve seen him do. He also did the ollie off the loading dock at the top of this page. I ollied up that before. Crazy. Definitely couldn’t do it now. I had a little line of front 180 the 2, sw 180 the curb. Ollie cheered as he always does when anyone lands anything. The kid is awesome. I started trying a line of nose manual the slanted manny pad, ollie up onto the sidewalk then kickflip the 2. Well that ended up sucking. The nose mannies were easy. The kickflip ended up being easy. But that whole ollie’ing up a sidewalk backside was not. One time I hung up and dove into the bushes and pillar. Ouch. I ended up doing a weird 90 degree ollie to tic tac and got the line. Perhaps I can blame some of it on the new(old) shoes, but man not being able to ollie up a curb hurts. But skating with Ollie was awesome and seeing his goofy kid tricks after pushing mongo puts a smile on my face.