Every year we go back to see our grandparents in Parkersburg, West Virginia. There are not very many skateparks in the area, but it is fun to go exploring down the Ohio river and our grandmother always has a lot of Summer things for us to do. This year we took an airplane so we didn’t stop at any skateparks on the way from Colorado. Nonetheless, when we got to the area we started looking around for skate parks.

The first skate park we went to was in Marietta, Ohio since it was the closest park to our grandparents home. There really wasn’t much there: 5 foot half pipe, 1 foot spine, small ledge and a quarter bowl. There’s a pretty strong group of skaters in Marietta, but my guess is the adults and city governments in southeast Ohio just don’t get the idea that skateboarding is a lot more than a past time for kids with nothing else to do.

On the weekend, we headed up to Athens Ohio where we found a nice concrete park. We wondered how old the park was because the surface was pretty beat up, then some sk8rs told us it was built only a few years ago. I’m not sure if it’s the humidity or what, but the surface at this park seems to have aged a lot in just 2 years. When we arrived in Athens it was 10:00AM and the sk8rs were already leaving because of the heat, so I guess you either skate really early in the morning or later at night since it looked like there was some nice lighting. In any event, there was a lot of good terrain and we skated it for nearly an hour.

Finally, in Athens some sk8rs told us about a park about 30 miles away called Skatopia. It sounded really interesting so we packed up the car and headed to Rutland, Ohio. Now, this park is hard to find, but well worth the effort. There was a skateboard museum with 100s of skateboards from past decades. There was a barn retrofitted for skating with massive 16 foot dropins! At the top of the property was a concrete park with a real school bus built into one of the bowls. We’d never seen anything like it. The park quickly became one of our top skate adventures of all time. Thanks Brewce, you rock! I hope you stay young forever!

Watching Alejandro skate the Greenwood Village Skatepark is always fun; afterall, we’ve been going there for almost 8 years now. We took our old Canon VH1 over to Mckinley a couple of weeks ago, but it took my dad a little time to encode the footage, edit it and place it on the web. He said it is actually easier to compress digital video using the Adobe Flash (flv) format and let Wordpress do the rest. I think he uses the Anarchy Media Player plugin. I guess we’ll start placing our videos on the blog in the future, but please let us know what you think about that.

Greenwood Skate Video

Anyway, enough of the techno-mumbo-jumbo. What do you think of the video and what about Alejandro’s skating? There are a couple of new tricks in the video. The kiwi slide is a lot of fun and he’s definately getting more grind time on the rails. Also, I noticed he landed a blunt, a 360 out and a judo kick.  I’d enjoy hearing from you, especially if you’re a corporate sponsor and you think there is a place on your team for us, but regardless…enjoy!

Over the years, I’ve picked up the names of different skate tricks from the people at the various skate parks, but I’m not always entirely sure how to spell them or if the trick names used amongst skateboarders are consistent. My observation is that most people do use similar names, but there appears to be local slang and different vernacular used from park to park. So here’s a picture of my latest Faky Air 180, or is it Fakie Air 180?

Just in case you are wondering….I landed it!