18 hours of prime visibility
I got back from Europe late on a Tuesday night, and immediately had to start getting ready to leave Thursday morning for the Bittercold Showdown in Ohio. Bittercold is another annual skate event, one of the biggest in the USA, similar to the Winterclash in Europe, and is also host to the industry’s biggest trade show of the year. It’s almost like repeating the trip I was just on; make a long journey, build a booth, work the trade show, shoot the contest, catch up with friends, and try to catch a wink of sleep somewhere in there.
BE-MAG sign in stencil form
screen printing studio
After having some inspiration from the booth in Germany, I got some design help from artist friends Jeromy Morris and Yuri Zupancic. Yuri set me up with a light-up plexi glass sign, and Morris drew up the blueprints for a booth. We also swung by Matt Ridgeway’s screen printing studio to whip up a few last minute shirts and hoodies that Rockwell designed a while back. We filled up the car along with a couple hundred magazines and our photo gear, and hit the road before sunup.
Morris sketching ideas for the booth
5am-ish leaving our neighborhood
one of the many accidents
hey big surprise, another accident
another one bites the dust
an extremely helpful sign
the snow is covering the other half of this super-mcdonalds in st. louis
oil check
13 hours into the drive i guess this was interesting
subtle?
snow mixed with some road
With a blizzard passing over while we slept, we started the drive in a few inches of ice and snow. What was supposed to be a 9 hour drive turned into a full 18 hour hydroplaning adventure across the midwest. Never able to get in front of the storm, our windshield wipers cleared enough room for us to see the dozens of cars on the side of the road whose overzealous drivers tried to push past 50 mph. The best wreck of all happened while we were watching Juno on the ipod (pretty good movie by the way) waiting for an accident to clear, and a truck from the other side of the highway lost control. He barreled through the median kicking up a tidal wave of snow , ran over a small car in front of us, and crashed into another truck that happened to be pulling 3 corvettes. I passed out within about 10 seconds walking in our hotel room once we finally reached Columbus.
Friday was a construction day, getting all the supplies for the booth, building, stenciling, painting … all that fun stuff. Worked all day until getting booted out of the park around 2am. Saturday was a complete whirlwind, putting the finishing touches on the booth just as all the kids were let in the door. They came in waves for 3 – 4 hours straight, while we tried to keep up with them all. It’s always a positive trade show, getting to meet a ton of people who are supporting the magazine, giving out free product, hearing feedback, as well as taking notice that the number of people has grown since the previous year.
anti-freeze
frigid
the lineup on Friday
getting the panels ready
stencils and spraypaint
intricate logos are lovely until you have to exacto-knife them out
ttssssssssssssss
piece by piece
making a mess
the booth before the chalk came out
the chalk begins
a few of the visitors
tradeshow mob
As soon as the chaos begins to die down, the contest gets underway and we switch gears from being behind the booth to getting behind the lens. Despite the frantic nature of trying to shoot contest photos, it’s always pretty amazing to have the worlds best rollerbladers all under one roof. At the end of the day, Alex Broskow took the win and pocketed a few thousand dollars to bring back to Kansas City.
a slice of the crowd
austin paz, 360
austin paz again, tts
standing here hoping cameron doesn’t miss and sweep my leg
Alex’s winning 540
Jeff going quarter to quarter
the booth at the end of the day
Sunday we drove back in half the time it took us on Thursday … Rob G jumped in for the ride and decided to live with us for a bit, and we saw an airplane on the highway that had to make an emergency landing … yep that about covers it.
the sunday morning olive garden takeover
95 more years till they re-paint this one
plane emergency landing on the highway
– interesting side note: when i just googled this to find a video clip of the plane, this article came up in the search results. A reporter interviewed me when we pulled off at the gas station but I never knew they used this until now… even though they spelled my name with a “v” and I live in Lawrence, not Kansas City.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080226/NEWS02/802260441
“I looked up and saw a bunch of people on the bridge taking pictures, and I was wondering what they were looking at, and then you see this plane, just idling in the middle of the road,” said Jeremy Stevenson, 24, of Kansas City, who was passing through Indiana on his way home.
“It’s certainly not something you see every day.”
I remember thinking the reporter was kind of lazy by not actually going to the scene, but instead simply reporting from a few miles down the road, and maybe I should have made up a wild story about how there was a huge explosion just after the pilot ejected, starting a brushfire that was spreading towards a small town whose main industry was chopping kindling and drilling for natural gas. I also seriously doubt I actually used the word “idling”.
And now that we’re on the subject of that gas station we stopped at, the cashiers name was Darlin’. She was really nice and has a pretty sweet name.
Kind of reminded me of a year ago when I was taking a rough Greyhound ride through the southeast, and found a gas station attendant in South Carolina named Boozer.
