welcome to oregon!

Hey!

First off, I highly recommend that all of you to take a skate trip to Oregon, the parks here are amazing and they are EVERYWHERE! Bean and I flew in from Jersey pretty early on Sunday, and got to skating right away. I have a few days to warm up and get used to the parks before the Oregon Trifecta, a World Cup contest consisting of three amazing concrete parks which takes place this upcoming Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The first park we went to, Pier Park in Portland, was pretty intense. It's brand new and has a really crazy bowl complete with a fullpipe, pool coping, 11.5ft deep and and a 9.5 ft shallow end. (Great way to warm up after a long flight huh?) The park also had a small beginner bowl, a medium sized bowl, and a small street course. I took a couple of runs in the monstrous cave bowl, but I was extremely exhausted so I just carved around a little bit.
Right after that we went to check out Battleground skatepark which is in Washington (but still part of the Oregon Trifecta) It's a pretty fun park that starts off with a 3 or so ft. shallow section and has a really crazy capsule, lots of hips and builds up to a 11 or so ft. deep end. As soon as we got there we saw Pat Ngoho and Julie Kindstrand rippin' the bowl. I skated with them a little bit but I was still really tired from the travels. The following day we started the day off at Battleground, we hoped to beat the crowd by going early in the morning, but we ended up having to weave our way through many young scooterers and rollerbladers.
After that we decided to head over to Lincoln City, which has been a part of the Oregon Trifecta every year. It's a bit of a drive, but it's definitely worth it. This park is probably my favorite of the three and has a shallow snake run-like section with a spine transfer into a medium section and some sharp hips leading into the slightly over-vert deep end. It also has a vert wall with about 4ft. of vert on it. After an hour or so, Liz Brandenburg showed up so I skated witrh her a little bit and she invited us to a cookout at her backyard bowl in Newberg Oregon. (The Trifecta included the Newberg park last year, which is an incredible park.)
Right now we're in Battleground, waiting for the rain to stop so that we can get to some skating! Once I fully figure out how to use this blog thing, I'll try and post some photos so that you guys can see these great parks.
See ya!
Amelia