Archive for July, 2009
Arch Angels of St. Louis…
Jul 17
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…
We Made it to the Grand Canyon with a lot of time to spare. We looked around at the tourist infested cliffs, the visitors center, and finally the back country office where we happened to come across a cheap wilderness permit for the night of the next day. We wondered how it could be so easy, according to all the info we got about the Canyon we read “RESERVE AT LEAST 10 MONTHS IN ADVANCE”.We later read the summer months are the hottest and most dangerous time to hike to the bottom (oops!). So with the hike planned and we spend the rest of the day preparing for our massive trek.
We woke up at early at 3:50AM, that gave us just enough time to cram some food in our mouth before we had to catch the bus to our trail head. There was an amazing sunrise as we hiked down to the Colorado, we enjoyed it immensely(being the first sunrise we have been awake for in all the tour). Five hours later we finally made it to the river. The temperature was cooking so it wasn’t long after we arrived that we were already in the river swimming, skipping rocks, napping, eating, and of course.. slacklining. We spent a lazy full day like this enjoying beautiful Grand Canyon Nation Park. The only downside was the sleeping, we carried no tents with us, nor any rain gear. I spend a night on the ground paranoid about rolling over on a scorpion while Holger and Andi slept top of the picnic benches.
The hike back was considerably harder and longer. It was a nine mile long beast complete with 5000+ foot elevation gain. We made it half way and took a break at the water station only to find a ranger wearing a mask drenching anyone, with a blue water pitcher, who dared approach the water fountain. Holger immediately charged her, arms in the air, about to tackle the poor lady, got his just desert. We continued the hike and after much toil, laboring, and water breaks, we got to the top, all 5000 feet if it. We made it to the car and made it to Vegas, and here we are writing the blog tonight from our hotel.
Share on FacebookLocation: 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.
All Good babyyyy!!!
Jul 14
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.
Fish, Poop, Bacon and Pus!
Jul 13
On Thursday, we had to leave amazing San Diego . We drove for a couple of hours through the middle of nowhere and headed towards Phoenix. The drive was interesting, we encountered a great many smells during our five hour drive. We first hit the a very strong fishy smell. It was as if we just crashed twenty gallon drum of rotting fish! Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse the smell suddenly got worse. Next we were drowned in smell or stagnate raw sewage for the next joyful twenty minutes(yummy!). We even smelled a great deal of bacon on the way too.
Phoenix itself was not quite ideal. It was on average 110 degrees Not the best spot for Slacklining, at night it cooled down to about 90 degrees. We tried our best, it’s not so easy to find slackline interested people in a baking ghost town. We preferred to make some night-sessions because of the heat,we slacked in front of a hooters, we slacked in a (which we were told later) closed park and also fought against the conditions during the day.
The second day in Phoenix Holger went to hospital. He had a thick swollen finger with lots of funky yellow stuff in it. Watch the result after a five hour surgery (ok, that includes also a little waiting time). Meanwhile Andi and I went to a park one mile away from the hospital and set up some lines. We managed a painful ten minutes of slacking in the burning shade before we submitted to a heat induced zombie state curable only with a bucket of cold water over the head.
That’s it - we got on the road to Flagstaff to challenge new adventures…
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After slacklining so hard the days before, we decided to take a day off to comfort our sore muscles. It turned out after, that this day would be one of the hardest, though one of the best indeed. First we split, so Andi and me went to the world famous and absolutely stunning SAN DIEGO ZOO. Amazing, nothing more to say. Mike went out for a walk, slacked a little and had a nap, while we searched the Gibbons in the zoo and discovered way more. After that, we reunited and split up again. Mike went climbing and Andi and me took Maggie out for surfing (all of us tried the first time. The surfin was even for us as balance artists not quite easy, so we now respect the surfers way more than we did before.
This tiny group then went out for some nightly downtown San Diego fountain flashslacking, which was great fun, concerning that cops were out on segways and passed us every 20 minutes. We did it and did NOT get caught. Fun day!
Share on FacebookBadass Water line!
Jul 9
We woke up comfortably on the 7th in Maggie’s house and decided that a good breakfast would be in order (since we now have a kitchen at our disposal). Holger made some apple and peach pancakes and I whipped up some cream and cut some peaches. After Maggie’s house we drove to Kellogg park in La Jolla shores and set up in a horseshoe of trees. Frankie, Maggie, Heather, James and Niki all joined us along with a steady flow of surfers and beach loungers, throughout the day. Later on in the evening we decided to set up a waterline under the Pier. It was a good time for all, us, lifeguards, and surfers alike. Holger threw some back flips and the line was challenging for everyone.
After a satisfying session we retreated to Heather’s house for some fantastic rare steaks (Holger’s was still mooing, just the way he likes it). All and all a great promo day and a great fun day.
Chillin in Chattanooga
Jul 8
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!
