Mystery of the weird ledges – Solved!

You knew it was out there. I didn’t even have to look very hard. Well now I know why those weird ledges are there. To prop up your ass while watching your friends just take that manual pad apart!

Now let me take a moment to reminisce about the old girl.

I was at a gymnastics meet with my kids near the ramp one weekend. Those gymnastics meets can last four hours and you are usually spectating from crappy surplus folding chairs or some sadistic bleachers that some dad in the booster club cobbled together by adapting plans for tiered feed sack shelving. Your kid actually performs for maybe three and a half minutes total. I have two kids doing gymnastics at different levels sometimes we are there for two sessions. Naturally I ducked out for a quick few runs on the handy vert ramp. Watch the video and read more after the jump.

I get there and find a few people trying to skate the vert and a dozen kids using the flat bottom of the vert ramp as a run up and platform for a propped up bench that they are trying to tailslide down. So we are trying to drop into this 12 foot ramp while kids are pushing side to side across the flat. A very frustrating session.

Eugene Lardizabal came over and told me there had been an incident with some kid pulling a knife and being video taped by one of the vert skaters. The kid took off before the cops came but plenty of the other kids were happy to provide his name an address.

All this long-winded bullshit is background for a lottery-money prank. We need to build a good-sized portable vert ramp that we can plop down right in the middle of that damned manual pad – using the pad to support a corner or something – and just interfere the hell out of the manual session. Justice would so be served. Actually that incident probably explains a lot about my attitudes to the whole skate plaza idea. I feel much better now .