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Friday, August 01, 2003

It was 73 degrees with sun and rain today. So what should I do? Go SNOWBOARDING! Yep, I was jonesing to ride my board, so I went to the Snowdome in Tamworth. Actually if I wanted to I could have gone swimming, ice skating and snowboarding; it is a big sports complex.

Right now they have two hours for the price of one right now. One hour cost 15 pounds or 24 dollars for the special. It is pretty good set up. When you pay they ask you when you want to start, give you a bar coded card that will let you through a turnstile and then you are on the snow! There is a conveyor belt that will take you to the top of the hill. It has vertical drop of 25 meters and length of 150 meters. One nice thing about is that it is not in a straight line, but curved a bit. Also there is a tow rope that takes you up half way. The snow was of good quality, not new fallen freshies, but on the lower part good old New England cement or ice showed up, I was trying to carve, but my board flew out under me. Oh well, I can’t whine too much. There is a grayish/silver reflective sheet that they bounce lights off to give that cloudy sunrise effect.
When you are done, you got to swipe your card to get pass the turnstile. If you over stay your purchased amount of time, you will pay an extra five pounds per 15 minutes

I started riding my Mistral 174/Bomber trench digger/Raichle hard boot combo for the first hour. A few people asked me if I could go fast on it. After going top to bottom in a few seconds, I anwser that question few runs. Also a few people asked it is hard to ride plates and such a long board. I find riding indoors with limiting space and snow depth to carve is a challenge.

After an hour, I switched to my soft boot set up and I even nailed a fakie 180. Oh I am so rad! It was fun ride up the side of the wall of the snow dome. There was a small sheet metal transition to the foam padded walls to ride off. The staff was cool and Chris at the hire table gave me the inside scoop on Jam or Jib night on Fridays. He said it was mad and they have a rig to set up a quarter pipe. It seems that jibbing is the big thing in England. I swore off jibbing after f$##@#ing up my knee many years ago. I might fall off the wagon and become a jibaholic again.
The only thing that sucked was the ride home on the M-1 motorway.

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