Go Skateboarding Day

So the longest day of the year has come and gone again. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but sometime in the last few years, some people took it upon themselves to hijack summer solstice and rename it Go Skateboarding Day, which works for me because that's how I approach almost every day of the year anyway. But the official date brought some organized festivities and if you were downtown yesterday then I'm sure you caught, or were caught in, some of the action, depending on your perspective.

I didn't make it downtown myself, but it sounds like Time Bomb and Emerica sponsored a pretty entertaining spectacle. According to my sources, a huge mob of skate rats under the direction of a megaphone-toting Cyrus Thiedeke swarmed from spot to spot hucking themselves off stairs, jumping down rails, and getting tech on ledges. Small monetary rewards were offered to those who threw down the hardest, but the money's hardly the point, right? Right.

I wasn't in the mood for a mob scene, so I aimed myself across the Second Narrows Bridge and ended up at Canada's oldest surviving skatepark, where a cooking session was about to get underway. And I mean cooking in more than one sense... thanks for manning the barbecue Leslie. It was the perfect setting to make my triumphant return to skateboarding after a five-month hiatus. After a few hours of speedlines and snakelines, I sat down and caught a somewhat rare Alex Chalmers Seylynn show before heading off to end the night with a bit of high-speed cruising at Hastings. All said and done, I was a little shaky in spots, a bit weak in others, my wheels didn't once leave the ground, and my axles never touched coping, but when the day was over I couldn't have been happier.