One of the things I really wanted to do out here in San Diego was to ride stuff that you’d probably never ever see in the UK, and I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of the past weekend doing just that.

Saturday was probably the longest day of riding I’ve done in a while. I rode over to my friend Craig’s house in Ocean Beach and met up with Chris (Hardy) and Mike Grosse. The plan was to head out to North County and session a pool, then ride some fullpipes that were nearby, and then head to Real Ride skatepark for the evening session.

We made it to the pool for about 1pm, with a few skaters and some riders (including Ryan Fudger and Gary Young) already there riding around. It was seriously impressive watching certain people ride that, Gary especially had the most speed and lines just carving all over that thing. It was my first time riding anything like that so I just nibbled about and tried to get used to how the thing flowed, as it’s a weird experience coming from riding ramp all the time where you basically just carve in one direction and head more or less straight up and down.

Seeing as more people were showing up we decided to leave the pool to the other skaters and riders and head up the road to some metal fullpipes that have been featured on the cover of Ride US and in a few videos. There’s about eight or ten of them all lined up together, some offering gap possibilities and lines if you have the skills. You can of course ride them individually, but they’re fairly tight and only about eight feet wide so you need to watch yourself. Again, I hadn’t ridden anything like this before but I was into it pretty quick and they were definitely fun, the hardest part was that it made you so dizzy and disorientated so if you didn’t concentrate 110% they’d catch you out.

Once we’d become tired of that place we headed further North to eat some food at Temecula and then on to Real Ride skatepark. This is a big park with various sections both indoors and outdoors, and it’s situated in a big fairground / farming location with a stock car track, RC car track, and BMX track dotted around the place too. The ramps were fairly sketchy being covered in dust, and black ramps at night illuminated by floodlamps make it hard to gauge the transitions sometimes, but I definitely enjoyed riding that place and it’d be fun to go back there again.

Sunday was way more chill, the initial plan being to session a newly constructed ditch in La Jolla but unfortunately we found that it had been filled with water and wasn’t rideable. One of the skaters that was with us suggested a highschool in Tierra Santa so we drove up there and found the usual array of benches and ledges to play about on. I felt totally knackered though so didn’t get up to all that much, and after that we went to a bank to ledge type deal that Chris knew of for a short session there which again was fun.

As far as pictures go, I shot a few on the Saturday of the pool and the fullpipes which are all here, and I’m now planning a fairly long soak in the bath and some Chinese food to help me recover from all that riding…..