10 minutes into a spontaneous session in a local Bowling Green skate park a healthy dose of rain hit and showed no sign of going away. We gave out as much info to the guys there and went on our merry damp way to St Louis.

We arrived in the evening and checked ourselves into the first Econo-Lodge we could find.

The next day was brighter and showed signs of being a good day for slacking. We made our way to the federal park and set up our lines right under the famous St. Louis Gateway Arch which was impressive to say the least. It stands 630 feet high and the same distance wide. Thats only 100 odd ft longer than the longest slackline record set by Damien Cooksey! Shame we didnt have enough lines to try and set a new record from end to end!

Anyhow, we set up a couple lines and started to build a healthy crowd of amazed onlookers! All was going well until some loser park warden came over and gave us a roasting for “damaging trees and soliciting”!! Eventually we convinced him that our tree protectors meant that no damage was being done and we would stop giving out our leaflets, and he left. Not good enough though apparently and half an hour later a couple of his superiors turned up to turf us out good and proper.

Fed up and frustrated, we left the park and decided the best option would be to go on the free tour of the Annhueser-Busch (Budweiser) brewery! Definately worth it as we made the most of the “two” free drinks at the end. (wink wink nudge nudge)

St. Louis done, we hit the road for Kansas City. Badabing-Badaboom! Another day done…

Location: Bowling Green Kentucky, Reason: Press coverage! Thats right, the Gibbon ECT2 tour got their first taste of local press!

Our first location in Bowling Green was a park called Shillito Park. This was a massive park with football fields, a baseball field, tennis courts, a disc golf park and possibly for the first time, a full blown European style slackline park!

Of course we wanted to impress our media crew, so we set up about 7 lines in a sweet formation and started laying down some acrobatics! All three of us were on top form, so when David and Mike (the media team for the Herald Leader and Kentucky.com) turned up, we were ready to show them what slacklining’s all about.

Though we did get some awesome tricks on film as well as a couple detailed interviews, they really wanted to get some shots of local people trying out the lines. Unfortunately Shillito wasn’t paying out the attention we were hoping for. So by their suggestion, we arranged to meet them at downtown Bowling Green’s Triangle Park.

To keep with the triangle theme, we decided to go for a 3 line formation, but before we had even got our lines up we attracted the attention of a group of young ladies from a summer camp group called “Stars”. And Stars they were. All of them were well up for trying out their skills on the legendary rope.

The reporters got the shots they were after, we got the attention we were looking for and everyone left happy. Make sure you check out the article and video right here:

http://www.kentucky.com/211/story/862721.html#Comments_Container

Keep on slacking in the free world folks!

Peace.

This blog starts a bit earlier….. in a time long, long ago and a land far, far away….. well, about 4 days ago and back in Tennessee.  We started the whole big long weekend journey visiting some retailers in Appalachia.  After almost three weeks straight of slacklining, our energy, muscles and sleep were all depleted.  Running on reserves and red bull, we had a few days last week of setting up some lines and just getting exhausted within half an hour.  We hit up a retailer in Johnson City, TN then drove to another retailer and combined climbing gym in Knoxville, TN.  We dropped off info about the new Gibbon lines but skipped the demos.  We picked up tickets from a hotel for All Good Music Festival which were overnighted from Boulder, CO and from Vermont and took off on a seven hour drive north through Appalachia West Virginia which was simply beautiful.  This is the area of the country prone to mountain top removal for coal, and we saw plenty of signs claiming “clean, carbon neutral coal.”   Yeah…… sure……  We finally camped on the side of the road in a State Park and were woken up numerous times by cars passing mere feet from our heads.  At 7 am, we were chased out by a ranger and made our way to All Good.

At All Good, we found a great camp spot in the woods, a bit removed from the rest of the festival grounds, but it was nice to be in the shade.  We set up a 40′ line both Friday and Saturday in a tractor path near our tent.  We had searched around for several hours, but the only trees were near our tent.  We got a bunch of people to try it out and had a great couple of days.

We also saw lots of good music. Galactic, Bob Weir and RatDog, Les Claypool, Bassnectar, STS9 (Sound Tribe Sector Nine), Yonder Mountain String Band, Ben Harper, Donna The Buffalo, Umphree’s McGee to name but a few.  Slacklining, chilling and meeting people during the day and music and parties in the evening and night.  The music was absolutely amazing and the people were just as awesome.  After the long weekend, we retired to a hotel and the next day drove to KY to hit up a movie theatre with a bar and restaurant combined with it.  They serve you while watching a movie on the big screen.  Awesome.  One of the best weekends of my life.  Thank you Gibbon and All Good Music Festival.

Once again we woke up to rain, rain and more rain. Annoying, as we had planned on visiting the Piedmont Park. A pretty famous park designed by the same guy that did Central Park in New York. However, Atlanta was trying to tell us it really didn’t like us, And due to Garmin (our SatNav) being severely frustrating and several road closures, Chris was really starting to feel the same about Atlanta. So we left for Chattanooga, which is a really beautiful place.

As we hadn’t yet visited any retailers, we thought it was about time we did. Rock Creek was the shop we targetted. After a good half hour of going round in circles trying to find the place we realised that we were actually at their warehouse site. DOH! We headed in anyway. They were really really sound guys. We had a good chat with them about how things were going for them with Gibbon and what our plans were and how we could help them out. All very encouraging. They gave us some directions to their retail outlets in Chattanooga, and off we hopped.

The first shop we visited was great. We set up a very beautifully arranged display in their shop and left them with plenty of promo material to help sell our lines. We also had fun slating our competitor Mammut’s MAJORLY complicated and expensive slacklines that they also stocked. After giving them a bit of a sales pitch and explained the new lines that are out in Europe, we moved on the the next shop of their’s in Chattanooga.

This one was smaller and didnt actually stock the lines, but we gave them some promo stuff anyway and then went out into the park just outside the store to do a little demo. This was a pretty chilled session with backing music from a steam paddle boat that used the steam to power an organ to play many tunes including “you are my sunshine”. Fun at first, but got old quickly. And that was Chattanooga…now we’re on the road to Asheville! Keep on slacking in the free world folks!

Yesterday was the turn of Atlanta to witness the might of the travelling Gibbons. But the weather had different plans. It was the first day we woke up to puddles on the floor and grey skies. This gave me a major flashback to life back in England and I counted my lucky stars that this was the first bad day we’d had so far on the tour. Anyways, we decided it’d probably be best to find somewhere indoors to set up our lines and demonstrate. We rang around climbing gyms and gymnasiums in the area in an attempt to find somewhere to accomodate us. Suffice to say this proved trickier than we thought.

The rock climbing gyms mostly seemed to have problems with liability and just didnt want to risk us setting up. (Which is pretty dumb considering you have to sign a waiver to say you’re not going to sue if you injure yourself in anyway when you enter). The gym we called just couldn’t understand what it was we were trying to describe to them.

We eventually managed to get co-operation from a rock climbing gym called Escalade. So we made tracks there.

This gym was no way as big as the Sport Rock Gym Ash and I went to in Alexandria but just as cool. It’s owned by Chris Seirzant, a pretty famous rock climber and had also been visited by Chris Sharma, known as the best climber in the world and also apparently a pretty damn good slackliner! unfortunately we didnt meet either of those guys but we did meet some legendary dudes who were well up for rocking our line.

Apparently they have a bit of a slackline following there already but none of them had seen anything like the line we set up. Took them a while to get used to it, but hey, it’s a completely new style to what they’re used to. By the end of the night we were swinging like tarzan onto the line from their training ropes which was awsome fun.

All slacked out and climbed out, we retreated to our hotel. Splendid!

We woke up on July 4th, hot, sweaty and humid.  It seems Miami is prone to frequent thunder showers, so after getting asked to leave from a late check out, we decided to do some laundry!  Finally, a couple of weeks without wash prompted us to take the time out in early afternoon to get some clean shirts, socks and shorts.  We then headed back to the beach which is obviously the center of everything in Miami.  The cars were oogled at by Miha and Ash, while I, simply people watched.  We set up a couple of lines in a grove of palm trees right off the beach and again had mixed reviews.  Some people thought they would bust themselves, but a little prodding brought them over.  Other people came right up and asked if they could try it out.  One family showed up, the parents German and the children Thai and Korean.  The Thai boy was awesome!  He has a slackline back in Asia where they live and he started rockin right off the bat.  We also had another guy from Ft. Lauderdale show up later who walked the line in a half hour, a total natural.  We had a lot of well toned people show up and apparently had it set up right near the main gay beach of Miami, which was very interesting.  We had the lines set up for about 5 hours and again, totally rocked it.

We took them down around 7 and found a horrible hotel since all the normal ones were excessively expensive from the 4th of July weekend.  We showed up, checked in and went to our room to find exposed nails, messed up bathroom and graffiti in the closet which was a warning of evil spirits.  Weird and creepy….  We headed back to the beach for a little fun on 4th of July and ended up staying up waaaay past our bedtime.  We did, however, manage to hit the road at a reasonable time and get 8 hours on our way to Atlanta where we are now.

The drive to Miami from Savannah was a long one. Because of this we decided to stop off before we got there and get some rest. So we hitched up in a hotel and we showed Chris some of the Gibbon videos from the year just passed. This proved to be inspirational enough for us to forget about the rest that we needed and set up a slackline at the hotel right there and then and trey some stuff out.

As usual, a crowd formed on the balcanies surrounding us in minutes. A couple of kids came down and joined us and we showed them some moves till about 2 in the morning! A great session.

Then we arrived in Miami with Will Smith “Welcome to Miami” pumping out of the sound system for the comedy factor.

We went straight to the famous South Beach. What a place!  We set up a line between a couple of coconut palms next to Nikki Beach Bar. A very nice bar with four poster beds for hire outside. Not for us though, we were busy slackling hard. Although generally we found the people in Miami were the most reluctant to get on the line (the most common phrase of the day was “nah man i’ll bust my ass!”), with enough persuation we managed to attract many cool people.

The beach culture here is huge and you can see why. Huge stretches of sand with beautifully clear and beautifully warm water that you could walk way out in and still only be up to ur waist. Ideal. Much love Miami!

Hey everyone! It’s time for another thrilling update from your crazy ECT2 boys! Well, maybe not SO crazy over the last couple days as we had a rather chilled time in Savannah.

Unfortunately 10 days straight non-stop slacklining had left us all feeling pretty battered and bruised. Each of us had injuries galore. (nothing too bad though so dont panic! and my nose is getting better by the day) So basically we went nursed our wounds in the beautiful sea of Savannahs Tybee island beach. It was pretty packed so we thought we should at least try to set up a slackline under the pier there anyway. However we were swiftly stopped by a lifeguard there. He wouldn’t actually tell us why we couldn’t set up considering we had great success under other piers. But he did say that he’d “call the police and they’d tell us why not!”. Rude!  So we gave up and crashed on the beach for the rest of the day.

In the evening we went to a bar downtown to meet some of the locals there. We saw some INCREDIBLE breakdancers performing to the tunes of the late great Michael Jackson on the way. Truly brilliant. Would loved to have seen what they would have made of our lines!

In the bar we got some good advice and pointers in the direction of good spots further on in the journey. Really great people. We even managed to get a lot of people interested just with the power of speech and postcards. =D We also scoped out where we could set up near to where the breakdancers were.
The next day unfortunately within 5 minutes of setting up we were moved on by a police officer and were told we’d find the same response anywhere in the city. So we ended up going to the main (but very empty) park in the city. We got in some practice on a long line in and then after an hour or so of having pretty much no one turn up to the park we thought it’d probably be best to start in on the 7 hour journey to Miami. And that’s where we’re posting this blog from. On the road.
We’re now feeling alot better and ready to kick Florida into a slackline frenzy!

Bring on the sunshine state!…

We rolled into Charleston yesterday and had two epic sessions, one at Marion Park, and one over a pool, which we put up yesterday.  This morning, we continued on our good fortune and hit up The Battery, a park on the southern point of Charleston, SC surrounded by cannons and cannon balls.  It seems it would have been a military post or something of the sort when Charleston was founded a few centuries ago.  We wrapped three lines around some huge trees I don’t know and a couple of palms and had people coming and going all day.  We found this spot on a recommendation, deciding between The Battery and Waterfront Park, the latter of which is apparently the mayor’s favorite park and we would have been asked to leave.  We must have had upwards of 100 people come along for a try, anything from a quick walk to a few kids and their grandma staying for almost an hour.  As the sun rose higher, the shade disappeared and we headed for Folley Beach, another spot recommended just outside of Charleston where a pier exists.

The surfing is apparently really popular down in SC (and NC) and there were plenty of athletes ready to step up.  We encountered a couple groups of shy girls who were not psyched, but almost every else hopped on after a few remarks of “You know you want to!”  Again, we had lines forming around the slackline and got people psyched on the sport.  It seems no matter where we go in South Carolina, people are not only welcoming but ready to walk to line!

After a 7 hour day of slacking and 600 photos, we’ve decided on the following photos.  We took so many photos that the camera battery died.  Check the select few to make it to the top!

…Which started with a very sleepy and sweaty journey to Charleston.

This was probably the most rockin sesh we had so far during the afternoon! Disregarding the unbelievably humid temperature, so many people were so open to what we were showing them. We met some brilliant new mates here. Like…truly great guys that stuck with us for the rest of the evening. So when the apparently DAILY downpour of rain came (and i mean it REALLY hit hard) we headed straight for the local apartment pool.

Which turned out to be another one of the coolest (if not the coolest) session so far. The power of a single piece of nylon webbing over a swimming pool is incredible. Suffice to say we had a CRACKING time. No…seriously though, I smashed my nose jumping into the pool. Blood…EVERYWHERE! Dah well! I’m fine and smiling as always…just rather swollen!

Pressing an ice pack/cool beer to my nose for the rest of the night, we made our way to another favorite lodging of ours…DAYS INN!!!

The rest, they say, is history!