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!