Back to Europe

My blog fell off the planet for a few months. Was bound to happen once I got into the busy part of the season.  Training and travelling quickly turns my thoughts to mush.  I'm sure better people than me would continue to keep writing, but writer's block kicks my butt when I'm tired.  All apologies to those of you who missed me.


Ahhh, just returned from my trip to Europe.  Any one who is my friend on Facebook or follows me on twitter @cheex32 (shameless plug) knows I was enjoying myself quite a lot.  I got to jump around from Germany to Switzerland to Belgium to Holland and then spent one last night in Germany.  When you go on long trips and get to see a lot of different things, usually the beginning of the trip gets lost in the back of your mind some place.  Not so much this trip, as I had a chance to go the the new Powerslide HQ.

Yeah, the picture pretty much says enough.  HUGE warehouse, meeting rooms, show room, gym, a room for molding skate, enough skating memorabilia to keep you buys for days, and a bunch of people just thinking stuff up.  It's just a huge building full of people who love to skate, and not just speed, all kinds of skating.  I tried to take some pictures of the inside, but as soon as I snapped a picture of the hover skates, my camera was confiscated and destroyed.

One of the craziest things that happened to me the entire trip happened on day 1 of my arrival.  I got off the plane, headed straight to Powerslide after traveling all night.  After a few hours at the HQ, it was time to go skating.  So I set off with Scott Arlidge and Matthias Knoll for what I thought would be just a normal skate.  I quickly knew this was going to be different as we started skating down the main roads, and Scott was using his hands to tell the cars to stop as we went through intersections(I was assured that this was safe, I didn't believe it).  For the next hour and a half we went up and down huge hills.  At one point we were flying down this super steep hill, being led by Powerslide owner Matthias Knoll.  As Matthias took a blind turn, a car was coming straight for him.  He jumped out of the way, Scott and I followed.  As soon as my heart stopped beating 1000 beats a minute I had several thoughts.  First I thought Matthias really really loves this sport.  Then I thought, "I've been in Europe for less than 10 hours and almost watched the owner of Powerslide get hit by a car while going 50mph down a hill.  This is going to be an interesting trip."

You know what this has gotten pretty long already and I've got a lot more to tell soooo......  I think I'm going to split this up and call this part 1.  I'll jump around to all sorts of things that happened along the way, so stay tuned.