Well, traveling to the airport at 3AM is one of the BEST times to avoid traffic and sleeping! One of the issues with wakesurf contests, is that there are so few of them, you’re almost guaranteed a trip of some kind. It would be nice to see more contests in the years to come, but in this economy it’s understandable that participation by both contestants and sponsors is down.
We have been to all but one of the USA Wakeboard Nationals – Wakesurf over the years. It’s been some of the best contests in a grassroots sense. The longboard division was always great fun, Jessica Osborne, the former World Wakesurfing Champion – Womens, was walking the full length of the board and walking varials. Team Calibrated, from back in the day, had Mikey and Austin manning the bbq where they promptly BURNED the hot dogs to a crisp and earned the nickname “the carcinogen twins”. The Snyder’s wouldn’t even let their dog’s eat the charcol mess!
In their defense, they had to turn the hot dogs using a philips head screw driver – hmmmm, hmmmm good, nothing like the sanitary taste of a screwdriver in your hot dog!
The current hot spots for wakesurfing seems to be California and Texas. The midwest had some interest, but never seemed to compare to the growth of the sport in the west and Texas. The shift of Shred Stixx to Texas and the establishment of Wakeoutlaws.com, now ToWanza.com generated substantial interest in that area.
Another thing that traveling to contests does is allow us to see, if just from the airport, various parts of the country. Today we connect in through Denver. I always love when runway’s of major airports go over freeways and interstates, you can look down and see cars zipping under the plane. I also love some of the cultural differences in these places. We come from California, the land of fences and coveted personal property. Everyone has a fence around their property, but in places like Minnesota a backyard fence was a rarity! Imagine, you Californian’s, your backyard was also your neighbors backyard!
Well, it’s just about time to board the plane, so I’ll stop here and continue later in the day. Ok, so I lied, we are now offically in Orlando and today is a practice day. Another thing about travel is JET LAG! It’s exhausting! We are going to be heading out for the lake soon, and hopefully I’ll have some pictures from the first day of the event. Just a few pictures from yesterday, the Orlando airport has a super fast shuttle type thing!
Inside the shuttle from the gates to baggage claim, there is a little bit of water in this neck o’ the woods.
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There is also a little bit of Disney in this area…we passed a road named “Seven Dwarfs Lane”
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…and NASA and the Kennedy Space Center show up now and again.
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