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Skaters who don’t skate parks altogether have found the true essence of skateboarding.
I guess this is a real unpopular opinion then, but I actually prefer skating parks to street skating these days. Only exception for street skating is skating a drainage ditch, I still love that shit.
To elaborate a bit -
Going out filming at spots with friends is undoubtedly magical. The car ride out, the shit talking, getting to a spot and playing flat ground games of skate to warm up, maybe bunt a few attempts at whatever trick you think you can do, MAYBE get a clip, and then the cheers and high-fives after a battle, closed out by a trip to get some food and reliving the daily highlights.
Super tight.
BUT, here is my issue.. you don't actually skate that much.
So much of the day is meeting up and driving to the spot (sitting in traffic - at least in CA), getting to a spot you don't really wanna skate but your homie does, and if you do want to skate the spot then you gotta take turns and wait to try your shit. If you're in a group of like 3 or 4 people it aint always that bad, but trying to mobilize any more than that is just futile. You're spending the entire day at the warm up spot. Not to mention showing up only to immediately get the boot from security. My friends I were kicked out by a couple security guards that were younger than all of us. That was weird.
Going to the skatepark however, homies are already there, or you're about to make some new ones. You can skate as much and for as long as you want. Tired of skating the ledge? Move 10 feet over and skate the hip. Ain't feeling the hip? What about the quarter pipe or step-up then? There's literally so much shit to skate at parks, and I get to skate wayyyy more when I'm at a park. Plus, young ass security guards won't be kicking you out.
My desire to go out and skate street or film another part is just gone. I've got about 8 parts or so under my belt, and filming them were some of the best times of my life yet. But I'm just preferring the park to the streets these days.
I distinctly remember being 17/18 and feeling kinda miffed when homies in the skate group started driving, kinda sucked a lot of the fun out of it for me. Obviously it opens up a lot of avenues in terms of road trips and going further afield, but for the day to day/weekly skating a lot of the fun was just bombing around to different spots, hitting things up along the way and stumbling across spots you hadn't seen before compared to say doing the same shit/spots but with a car and packing everyones shit up, sitting in traffic, finding parking, getting everything out again etc which is then made even worse by living in area known for having terrible road infrastructure with frequent traffic/multiple mile long tailbacks, crashes, etc which can turn 20 minute journeys into potentially hours if you're unlucky.