etnies skate - news

Touring South France...

by: Brink | Sunday, March 16, 2008 | 8 comments

The Riders:

Willow
Charles Collet
Evelien Bouilliart
Tuukka Korhonen
Julian Furones
Steve Forstner
Alessandro Magnani

The Recap:

We drove from Basel to Lausanne to pick up Alessandro at the train station, stopped in Lyon to grab Charles, and then had five more hours of driving ahead of us. We got to Nice at three in the morning. Luckily the flights of the rest of the team didn't arrive before noon the next day. Once we got everybody in the van we started hitting the spots in and around Nice.

Furones... nosebonker.

On the second day we got a small taste of the lifestyle of the rich and famous in Monaco. Only a half hour away from Nice this low-tax paradise has some nice skate spots. Willow got a really good switch heel and Tuukka came trough with a solid line.

We had high expectations for Sunday and the trip to Ventimiglia, Italy. Some of us had already skated there and the spots had something to offer for everybody. Of course things didn’t go as planed and some dark clouds moved in from the mountains. Just as we got to the first spot, raindrops started to fall. We decided to use the off time to drive around to check out more spots. On a streak of more bad luck, the main spot we had hoped to skate was fenced off and scheduled for demolition. As soon as the rain stopped we climbed the fence and started to dry the ground. Willow was jumping down the stairs before it was even halfway dry, to but the cops kicked us out just as he got close to landing the varial heelflip. After a long session at the train station spot, we headed back to Nice to pick up Evelien from the airport.

The weather was not looking very good for Monday, so we decided to head west to Hyeres. On the way there we got stuck in the middle of a crazy thunderstorm and some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen. We passed two gnarly accidents on the one-hour drive. Our gamble paid off and the sun came out just as we approached Hyeres. We dropped our stuff at the hotel and headed straight to nearby Toulon to skate the famous “small” rail. The rail got knobbed since the last time we were there, so we had to improvise. After getting kicked out of another spot, we finally got some stuff done near the end of the afternoon.

Forstner!

The next day we headed back to Toulon to take care of some unfinished business and hit a big gap near Hyeres at night. Willow struggled to get his trick, while we worried about getting kicked out by the janitor of the nearby school. In the end, Willow was successful and we left the spot without any trouble.

Willow. Ouch.

The last days of the trip were spent in Nice, where we finally got to skate the famous Massena Plaza. Almost everybody got a trick there. Later we headed to a big set of stairs, where Willow jumped as if he wasn’t sore at all from the night before.

Despite some bad luck with the weather, disappearing spots and the police, we had a good time and the trip turned out to be quite productive.

Tuukka, Charles & Furones