years ago i bought an MBUK with steve geall in it. this was during the time of foot and mouth. in it was some rant about not being able to ride cos of it, with the solution coming from steve geall who thought it would be a good idea to ride skateparks since he couldnt ride dirt. genius. however thats not the point, the point was that he was riding a skatepark that was proper old school. a few days ago i found that MBUK lying around and wondered where the park was. apparently it was in some place called Calne.
never heard of it.
so it turns out its not far from swindon way. so that aint far then. so next clear day we have we jump on a train to chippenham with only the knowledge that theres a place called Calne that has a skatepark. now i dont wanna blow our horns too loudly but me and aid have a pretty good record for following hunches and finding trails or parks with no real information..eventually anyway.
so thats what we do. heres something that means something if nothing.
we woke up stupidly early at 8am. now i havent been awake at that time since i left college. station at a time that i really shouldnt be conscious at.
to say where we were was nice would be a big fat understatement. it was amazing. from chippenham we followed some cycle track for 6 miles until we reached calne. the whole way there was woods and fields with some of the longest, straightest tracks ive ever seen. taking a break - 4 miles to go.
yo! we wandered around calne for a while which is pretty too, bought some out of date food from iceland, dont do it kids then found the park after asking a lovely lady at a library. alliteration! i was tryna remember that word the other day. stokkkked.
aidan tryna find some lines.
now im not really sure what it is that attracts us so much to sweeping concrete parks with zero tranny, i can only presume its a result of childhood since you can always blame stuff you do in later life on childhood. whatever it is, pumping and flowing round a big concrete bowl is bare fun.
i cant stress enough how mellow and badly transitioned stuff was. some of the stuff wasnt curved, it was straight so it was like riding up a kerb. but that made it even more fun trying to pull something good. yak table off a mellow bump, get that fisheye out, make it look better than it is.hahaha.
doing this at high speeds for as long as possible was funnnnnnnn. its always the simple things. i must of done this hundreds of times. aidan noser on the 'hip'. can you see the transition?
since calne is in the middle of bumpkin land, the graffiti left a rather large amount to be desired. the best one we saw was ' dan S is gay'. awwwww, so cute!
this picture reminds me of an article Ride once did about skateparks called 'parklife'. thats my second magazine reference. i'll try squeeze a third one in at some point. we'll see how it goes.
aidan, out of focus table over the little hip much higher than he should be. there was a bigger hip down the other end, the one steve geall was riding but there was a huge puddle right bang in the way which wasn't the best idea.
the best thing about old school parks is you have to find your own lines. this was mine, and not that easy either. you had to crank it pretty hard at it then try and go high off a mellow transition before attempting to land on a landing that honestly was the length of just my back wheel which made it kinda hard to land amazingly smooth, but much more fun. yak - shady gap.

sometimes they have gap pictures in magazines. yep - no.3.

[video] - aidan proper ferret. crossfooted disaster. 324kb.

so then we got pretty tired and started the 6 mile trek back to the station like real men. cars are for wimps? aidan did some bench gaps, we stopped at yet another pretty river and did some pro dipping and watched big aeroplanes fly low as well as watching a pikey pitbull dog rumage through my bag then nick my 2 pasties leaving no trace he'd ever been there. greedy fucking animal.

and that was that. it was an awesome day, despite no amazing riding going off. and that means it was a good day.

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the lure of the old school
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