By Danterra: Posted 4-19-06
The winter skating scene in Illinois looks so awesome! I can't remember why I left in the first place! - k.ed

This year I spent my spring break time in the Midwest of all places visiting family, I didn’t see any boobies or drunk college chicks but I was able to skate a couple of parks. 

The first place I got to ride was Champaign, IL.  What a big bummer this park is.  Its all concrete and I heard that it cost somewhere around $300,000.  Unfortunately it was built by someone who had never built a skatepark or least a good skatepark.   The “street” area which used to consist of 2 big sausage-like lumps of concrete now only has one, the city removed one of them and now there is nothing but a big flat space in the middle, wow so street-like.  The rest of the street area has a couple of ledges and rails and a quarter pipe with some super-coping that sticks out almost 2 inches. 

The other main feature of the park is the spine ramp. This ramp is probably close to 4 feet tall with transitions that rival the steepness of a pool’s shallow end, we’re talking tight and fast and kind of hard to skate.  The biggest let down of the park is the bowl which at first glance looks like it would be lots of fun, well it would if the transitions weren’t full of lumps and sags.  The waterfalls in this thing are nice and steep too so be careful when moving to another section of the bowl, that is if you can keep up your speed.   Any way I rode Champaign alone for a good hour before I couldn’t take it anymore.  I decided to head a few blocks away from the park where there’s a fountain with transitions and cement coping. It is usually drained in the winter and is pretty fun.  I got a few grinds in and split before I could get kicked out.

The next stop was the Springfield cement park, now this place is worth the time it took to drive the 80 miles from Champaign.  Springfield is a Site Design Park that consists of an interconnected bowl/flow style area and a small street area with a couple of ledges and rails.  The first time I skated this place I was stoked and couldn’t believe that it was actually there, now 2 years later the park is still pretty rad and I had more fun this time than I did 2 years ago. 

There was also a lot more grafitti than there was 2 years ago, brilliant works of art like “OI Bitch” and “Big ass Titties”.  During this session I was practically alone, only one other skater showed up and he mostly rolled around the flatbottom and slammed once trying to drop in.  This is the reason why you are stuck looking at pictures of the park with no action shots other than me drinking a beer.  Well what can I say, the Midwest sucks in the winter, it’s cold and you can’t skate most of the time. Next time I’m going there in the summer.

Dantera