Journal Archive from July

July 31, 2001

Another Demo day! This evening Andy and I headed up to Parsonsfield, ME to perform a show for a Mountain Bike Camp held at Back Country Excursions. We hit the road in the evening around 5, just in time for the rush hour traffic. This made our trip a little longer. After a quick gas stop and McD's run we were back on track. We arrived at Back Country around 9:30. As we pulled in we saw the Cliff's house (the owner) surrounded by bikes, bikes were everywhere! We stopped in met all the campers, and found our spot to set up. Our plan was to unload the trailer right off so we didn't have to worry about it in the morn. We also needed a place to sleep inside the trailer. It's camping afterall! After we finished setup we headed inside and caught a few videos with the kids. Now it's kicking back in the trailer, talking about trials....what else, and hoping it's not going to be cold tonight! Until the morning.

July 29, 2001

This morn we planned to wake up early and hit the skate park at Stratton. Pete and I were up around 8:30 ready to go but Tim was still passed out. We decided to leave him behind, loaded up the truck and headed over. I was ready to ride and we pedaled over to the park. When I saw the park I was really dissapointed. The park was so cheesy this year! I couldn't believe what they did to it. Last year it was huge. It had the large half pipes and an amazing street section. This year was two small quarter pipes, two small fun boxes and a kick turn ramp. I was just wondering what happened to the rest of the ramps! The good part, it was free to ride. So we messed around until it got crowded then headed into the village. We found some fun stuff to ride on and a few walls that made for some big ups. After we got tired we went to the apartment for lunch. Pete cooked up some awesome burgers, and we watch yet another movie. After the movie we decided to pack up and go home. It was a fun relaxing weekend.

July 28, 2001

I slept pretty late again, I think this is going to be a common Saturday event from now on. Even Tim was up and downstairs watching TV. I finally got ready and we headed to the grocery store and picked up ton's of food. Tim had this idea to make steamed clams for dinner. Now here's an adventure, find a fish store in a land locked mountainous state. Well we did, come to find out there was one right in Manchester, VT! After that, we headed back to the apartment and cooked up some lunch. Shortly after we received a call from Pete to let us know he was on his way. The rest of the day turned into a movie marathon featuring Adam Sandler. We have every Sandler movie ever made in VT. Pete showed up, we cooked dinner, and after worked on our bikes. Once we had them tuned, we headed out for a little trialsin across the street. (some cool obstacles) By the time I was finished riding I was ready to pass out. So I'm finishing up this journal entry just before I head to bed.

July 27, 2001

Ahhh, finally relaxing in Vermont again. It's been a little while, since the wedding in fact. I headed up with Tim this weekend, for a kick back and do nothing weekend. Pete should be heading up tomorrow afternoon to hang out also. The drive went pretty quick at least. I was afraid of annoying traffic seeing earlier today I was stuck on the Mass Pike doing 5 mph from the time I got on to the exit before the one I get off. I really don't understand why people can't drive in a courteous and safe manner. Because one lane is going faster than the other, people think if they switch to that one they get further. Then they switch back, one to the other.....annoying morons! And they wonder why traffic always comes to a stop......OK enough of my ranting, I vented and all better now. Besides I'm in VT! No Problem! I'm turning this thing off and going to bed. Tomorrow I'm tuning my bike and getting a little riding in.

July 25, 2001

First off, I can't believe how fast this season is going by. It's almost August which brings a few busy months with some huge demos and events. Not only that, another year older for me. Well besides that, tonight was really cool. Jason Hill and his Dad are taking a tour of the NorthEast and they had a chance to stop by! We had a little welcoming group for them that consisted of myself, Tim, Pete, Chris P. and Andy D. We visited our local favorite pizza and beverage establishment Pyzzz. There were many stories and probably more than a thousand pictures to look at between Pete and Jason. As most of you know, Jason is now living in Uppsala, Sweden so it was really cool to hang out with him and his Dad before he heads back. I'm sure there will be another surprise drop-in by Jason sometime in the near future...unless we take a vacation to Sweden sometime...hummmmm.

July 23, 2001

We'll I'm still kicking back. The whole weekend was focused on relaxing. I need to relax my body for the next few weeks before I get back to shows. I guess I must have beat up on myself pretty good for my back to be feeling this way. I'm hopefully going to get out a bit on my bike tomorrow and work on balance stuff. I finally put my Rock Shox back on and got everything tuned in again, so I can't wait to ride my stock. Not only that it looks like I need to retire my oh so wonderful Monty (na, that wasn't any sarcasm) because the rear end is about to be ripped off it. Well I'll keep you posted on how tomorrow goes for riding!

July 18, 2001

It has been a pretty slow day today. I have been relaxing as much as I can because I hurt my back two weeks ago at the Lake Placid event. Not quite sure what I did but I have been seeing the chiropractor to try and fix it. I have the next few weeks off so this will give me a chance to take it easy. I had this problem before after my knee injury and it went away after therapy. I may have to go back if it keeps up. We'll see.

July 17, 2001

By the way did I tell anyone yet that Ted made Wendy and I a custom Tandem? Well he did. I'm just waiting for a nice day to get some great shots of it for our sites. I just brought it up because I had some work to do on it this evening. Not only that I had to fix my stock bike a bit. I just replaced the fork in the front back to my Rock Shox. Finally, I love this fork for trials. Very light and very reliable. The tandem though, this thing is amazing. It is another cult following and dicipline to cycling. The coolest thing is we get to ride together and it go really really fast!

July 16, 2001

Yes it is the middle of July and I'm finally getting back to my Journal. I know you are all wondering what's been happening so I'm going to start filling in the blanks. Here are some entries from the past few weekends that ended up to be pretty wild.

July 15, 2001

This morning was a lazy morning. Woke up pretty late and just got all our gear together and cleaned up the house before we left for breakfast. You couldn't beat this place, talk about spoiled for the weekend. We loaded the truck and walked to breakfast. We walked through the door of the same restaraunt and this morning everyone knew us. The waitress said she kept waving to us but we didn't see her. I think we were focusing on not falling off the trailer! We ordered breakfast, a bit less than yesterday because they really load up the plate. You know, when our order came, I think we had more than yesterday! We finished breakfast and headed back to the house for a final check that we had everything. We then hopped in the truck and headed to the fire station. Today we have to move the setup to the main stage. We are going to be the center of it all! We moved everything over taking brakes between each box watching 'water ball'. It's a ball suspended from a 50 foot long wire about 15 feet in the air. The ball slides along the wire. The object is two teams of five firefighters on each side use the water hose to blast the ball to their goal. Pretty fun actually. Just after we finished getting the section in position Brett showed up to see how things were and take us to lunch. It was our show fuel. We had 3 shows today one at 1:00, 3:00 and last one at 7:00. All the shows went extremely well. Even though it was tiring, the crowds were huge and fed your adrenaline rush. We packed up and headed home. We left around 8:30 for our 6 hour drive home. As we were leaving the town Trev was giving me the directions. So we're driving, and driving, and driving, all of a sudden we see the sign that entered the town again! Yes we were freaked and remembered the Grounghog Day comment. But we reviewed our bearings and headed home and pulled in real late. I felt bad for Andy because he planned on still going to the EFTA event in the morning in NH! I think I'm going to sleep now though!

July 14, 2001

I got up a bit early this morn to get my bikes dialed in from the weekend before. I got everything cleaned and ready for this afternoons events. Now here is a first ever for trials! I'm pretty confident to say no one has ever done a show like this before. So the town of Wolcott has this parade. We were to perform in the parade, riding our bikes through the town. Well the stakes went up. We are now going to ride through the town in the parade on a 53 foot long flat bed trailer with a five foot high deck! I don't want to get too far ahead of myself now. But Andy and Trev finally woke up and were ready for breakfast. We hit this diner just down the road for some good eats. As we walked through the door and took a seat, some one said "Are you the guys riding your bikes in the parade tonight?" We replied "YES" and thought "Word gets around fast here!" So we ate and were getting ready to head back to the house, until someone came through the door looking for Kevin Brody. I guess there is no hiding but it was Brett's brother Brandon and his son. Brett told us about him and his bicycle shop in town. They were really cool and really into biking. From road, XC, trials and he even has this awesome Santana Tandem. We headed back to the house got some stuff together and went to visit his shop. It is really cool, and right downstairs in his basement. I'm thinking "Someday". We hung out and talked bikes for a few hours and fixed one of my cables. Then we went to their parents house down the road for a cookout and more family and town stories. After some excellent grilled chicken and other goodies we took a quick trip to a place called the "Chimneys". This was on the banks of Lake Ontario and they were these huge pillars of sand and stone ranging over 500 feet high! These were caused from erosion over the years, and they just keep growing. After that visit we headed back to the fire house to prepare for the parade. So we picked out the boxes we were putting on the trailer when it showed up. It was very large and somewhat nerve racking. So we took the step box placed that on first, then the four foot box, the two foot box and a ramp. We were thinking about a triangle but decided against it afterwards. We strapped everything together and gave it a walk over. Remember the trailer was five feet high to begin with, so once on top of the four foot box, it was about a bit over 9 feet because of the bow in the trailer! You know those people who say they drop nine, ten feet......where are they now! (insert devious laugh here) It was pretty scary and the truck wasn't even moving yet! So Andy and I practiced for a bit and relaxed until the start of the parade. The parade was to last over an hour and we had to keep on riding as we went through town, along with a show just after the parade. So we needed to rest. The time came we loaded up on the back of the trailer and headed to the start of the parade. We were about to make trials history! We messed around for people in the parade who were near us, then we were ready to roll. We had a few streets to take before we hit the main drag so we were able to adjust to the moving vehicle. It was strange, the truck is moving forward, you are moving forward to bunnyhop onto the box, and everything visually stays moving when you finally stop! Weird. We hit the main drag and people went crazy for us! It was such an incredible feeling, the parade route was packed, people kept cheering the whole way and never gave us a chance to stop riding. The crowd kept us so pumped up we didn't even realize how long the parade was. We came around the last corner of the route back to the fire station. We had a small crew unload everything and set it back up in our demo area. After a little bit we put on a tickler show for the crowd. Afterwards we chatted with ton's of people, cleaned up our sound system and bikes put those in the trailer, roamed around the fair a bit and headed to the house for some sleep.

July 13, 2001

Today is show day. We head to Wolcott, NY for a weekend of shows for the Wolcott Fire Dept. Summer Festival. I met up with Andy at work in the afternoon. From there we headed to my house to lock and load the trailer. Andy decided to take the long way to my house though ;-) You can ask him about that when you see him next. Anyhow, we finally got all loaded up with Andy's gear and headed to Trev's house to pick him up. His toe is still broken so he is going to be the official announcer for the weekend. The drive is pretty easy.... just head west young man! So we did. Followed the directions and finally found Wolcott. The total drive was about 6 hours. Wolcott is a pretty small town, and reminded us of the town from the movie Groundhog Day. (I have to mention this because it comes into play later on in the weekend.) We were pretty tired and couldn't wait to get some sleep. So a little driving around we noticed a person carrying an inflatable dolphin. Now normally that would seem kind of strange until we noticed the Ferris wheel lit up in the distance. Phew we were there! So we pulled into the Fire House and met up with a few of the people. I couldn't believe the reception we had even at midnight! We were given directions to our hotel, which actually was a bed and breakfast, that actually turned out to be a huge house we had to ourselves for the weekend! The house was built late 1800's but renovated to it's original state. So it's very new and modern is some ways, electricity, cable, etc. but when you walk in, it takes you back to that time! The way it was decorated was amazing. So after a little unwinding, a cold beverage, a visit from Brett Furber (the organizer of the event) and a few ghost stories to wind up Andy a bit before bed, we all passed out.

July 12, 2001

Today is prep day. This weekend is the Tour de NY. We have a few weekend shows in the Village of Wolcott NY. So, got to get the trailer packed with all the demo stuff, bikes, tunes, and gear. Get all the directions straightened out and ready to take off tomorrow!

July 8, 2001

Whiteface Mountain Competition. Entry to come!

July 7, 2001

Bike Moves...aaaahh-ahhhhh Bike Moves, could be the song? Well today was the Bike moves event we hosted in downtown Lake Placid. I was the Master of Ceremonies the riders were J.J., Jeff. L., Jeremy V., Scott T. and Chris C. The sections were created by the master carpenter Mr. Perkins! It was a wild day consisting of five events, the five main diciplines of trials Gap, Up, Balance, Rear Wheel, and Bunnyhop. The Gap contest was setup with two boxes 4'x4'x4' each where you had to take off on the first and land on the second only using tires. The up or box jump was one of the same boxes used for the gap, just elevated in 2" increments. Balance contest had a course of balance beams and the person who made it the farthest won. Rear wheel had triangles you had to gap on your rear wheel, and the Bunnyhop was a bunnyhop over a crossbar. It was a great time challenging all the riders. My mouth was dry by the end of the day. We had a large number of spectators, and all were amazed as these guys pushed their limits.

July 6, 2001

LAKE PLACID! Were off to the mountains!