skate journal: First trip to the Lafayette park (Dec 14, 2010)
Posted in Skate Journal on December 15th, 2010 by corpoI work til 6 this week which isn’t that bad, but it pretty much ends any chance of skating with most of TF as their bed times are 8pm and I normally check in with the family before I go skate. As soon as I got home Ollie said “Hi ya Pop, want to go play basketball?” Impossible to say no to that. So we went over to the school and shot on a poorly lit low hoop for awhile. It was a blast. My favorite is when he misses and I jump up for the rebound and dunk it. 8 foot rims rule! Anyways, it was super warm so I left after awhile and picked up Jason to meet Lazer, Fuzz, Neil, Brian and Skelly at the newly opened Lafayette park. Apparently it wasn’t crowded by grand opening standards. The park is pretty big so it does get spread out and not so bad. Unfortunately Lazer, Fuzz and Neil had already called it a night. Brian was there skating with the Ft Collins crew in the rock section. They all seemed to be ripping pretty hard. I tooled around for awhile looking at the goods. The park is pretty amazing. As typical of skateparks it seems they went a little over the top with quite a few things, but oh well. Jason and I started out at the manual pad which can really only be hit frontside comfortabely. If there is granite somewhere under all that coating I couldn’t tell yet, it’s like grinding on ice. I got a few front 50, front 5-0 and back 50 having to come up the bank first. I’ve been skating steet a lot lately and it was weird skating such a smooth spot. It doesn’t even feel like your skating really. I know that sounds dumb, but it’s weird not having any cracks or anything with brand new wheels. Just feels like floating. A sketchy backside landing lands you in the 12 foot bowl. So lame. I really hate how 99% of skateparks put great ledges in shitty spots. And to know that Team Pain is a bunch of skaters makes it even worse. I basically took the rest of the session to get boardslide down the rail followed by back noseslide down the hubba. That was really fun for sure. The added touch is the lights shut off as I landed the noseslide. Well I guess that isn’t even cool at all considering it was 8:45. WTF? Come on Lafayette you spend that much money on a skatepark and the lights shut off before my 8 year old goes to bed? Jason got the boardslide / noseslide run too and came close to front nose down. So sick. Some of the lights stayed on near the parking lot. I dorked around for a bit on the rock section that I hadn’t even looked at really. It seems aight, not as fun as CO Springs rock section. Some young kid told me to look out as he rolled his bike through. That was funny.