While walking all over Montreal I saw a million things that would be fun to ollie over, but knew that I couldn’t ollie over any of them. So it made me want to work on the ol’ basic again. Ollies. For some reason this stupid rock on campus stuck in my head as a good place to start. It has a horrible approach. Down a sidewalk then have to turn at the rock last second. After cruising around the parking lot below it for a bit I went at it. The approach was so much harder then I remembered. Then a car parked pretty much right in the landing so I went and did a few flip tricks and cruised the lot for a bit. They stayed there forever just sitting in the car with the lights on so I went down the hill a little. Found a fun line of ollie up a curb, ollie down a 3 then kickflip a small crack to crack gap. Went back up and the car had finally left. I struggled and struggled and finally managed to get a couple ollies that might have gone over the corner. I don’t even know. Maybe I’ll learn how to ollie some day. Oh yeah, had some new 50mm STFs. They good. Not supernullethane good, but I like the little size a lot.

On our last morning in Montreal i went to go to the crazy DIY spot I saw, but it had already been destroyed by the city. DOH! Luckily I like street stuff a lot and this was right across the street. I only had about 15 minutes before we needed to catch the airport shuttle. I manualled from right to left and noseslid to fakie up the ledge. That was all. That spot has a lot of potential for lines. Maybe next time. Ha, as if there will ever be another time.

I had done some skate spot research before going to Montreal. I watched this Adidas clip and this Barry Walsh clip and Carleigh (who lived there for awhile) pointed me in the right direction. Thanks Carleigh! This ledge was really close to the hotel and in a park that Liz wanted to walk in. So it was a win win. My legs were really shot from walking so much over the previous couple days. Liz refuses to rent bikes, cars, take busses, anything. We walked everywhere. I wish my legs didn’t got sore so easy, but they were wrecked. I was still hyped to skate though. On the way there Liz walked (of course) and I skated mostly just doing kickflips and ollieing up curbs and stuff. This was the longest I’ve gone without skating in a long time and I was pretty rusty. We got to this spot and of course the ledges seemed weirder then they look. First the amount of wax on the two main ledges was insane. And it was super hot and humid and it would splash up. This scared me on front 50s so much. They weren’t all, but the shortness of them weirded me out too. Luckily since it had been so long since I skated the thing I missed the most was flip tricks and doing them on granite is extra fun. For some reason I had f/s halfcab heels stuck in my head and started trying them. I ended up getting a few of them and tried to follow them with front 50s, but would normally just slide around on the ledge and jump off because of all the wax. There was also this mini kicker thing that I would kickflip out of sometimes. Going the other way I tried lines of crooks, noseslide to fakie then fakie varial flip. I might have gotten that. Got a couple treflips. I was really struggling though. Liz showed up ready to go and I hadn’t really landed much of anything. I finally got a front 50 and a front noseslide to fakie. She took a couple photos and we headed out. The one below is of me showing my frustration of how bad I suck on ledges and what a sweaty mess I was.

Still glad I was able to skate a little though and now I can say I’ve skated in three countries. Neato.