It’s a good thing it’s summer holidays and I don’t have to go into a classroom tomorrow morning.
If it were a school day, I would have wobbled in awkwardly. The students would have all asked, “What happened?” and I’d end up sharing another skateboard injury story. But I thought I’d share the story with you here nevertheless.
Kiwanis Skateboard Plaza just opened up this summer in London, Ontario. It is an absolutely gorgeous park that I’d been dying to visit for some time. If you want to go it is located at 1475 Brydges Street.
This picture is from the Facebook page for the park and was taken at the opening ceremony.
Completed Skateboard Park is a “plaza” style design covering approximately 1,700 square meters. Some of the features included in the park are: hubba style ledges, banks, pier 7 manual pad, lilly pads, jersey barrier, hips, curved ledge with extension and gap, pump bump sequence, transition gap, concave ledge, corner C-ledges, euro gap, transition/miniramp feature, coin bank. This park is geared towards beginner and intermediate skill levels – info from “Ready to Skateboard: London’s places to skate”
I have to say that I have never seen such a great park before. It has so much in it, including two halfpipes complete with coping bars.
I have been skating at parks that only have quarter pipes and most of those don’t have the coping bar at the top.
It had been a while since I’d skated an actual halfpipe. I love halfpipes.
Of course, since it had been so long, I started off slow. I didn’t try to do anything outlandish. I just tried to get comfortable on the ramp. I was doing just fine for about ten minutes.
The next thing I know, I was rolling down the ramp and wasn’t quite properly balanced on my board. The board shot out from under my feet and I went crashing to the ground.
Fortunately, I was wearing a helmet. Still though, it was quite the wipeout.
I took some skin off my elbow in the fall, scraped up my hip and bruised it quite a bit. Ouch!
It hurts to just walk right now. I know that it’s gonna continue to hurt for a week or two as well. But falling is a part of the sport. You can’t expect to skateboard and never fall. I’m just glad I have the sense to wear a helmet when I go to these parks now.
