Best Month Ever: April
For April fools day I was in Ireland. Being a quarter Irish, I really felt that I needed to visit the country and explore my heritage. That, or my cousin lives there and I had a free place to stay. Either way, the country is known for beer and so I knew I could count on a trip there to make the month of April. I used jetlag as an excuse to sleep until 1 everyday
but still managed to proverbially paint the town green. I started my pub
crawling in Limerick where I drank at a college bar, and then decided to
do some real tourist stuff. Now I heard that it rains a lot in Ireland,
but since I was there, it was sunny and beautiful for my trip to the
ocean. The water was surprisingly warm and there are big cliffs that are
really cool to look at.
From Galway it was off to Dublin. I had researched on the internet and found out about a skatepark on a rollerblading website. Other than being hard to find, the skatepark was decent, two floors with a mini ramp and a street course and funny locals who all spoke with Irish accents that, even after a week, I had trouble understanding. On April 3rd I flew to Barcelona. I kind of decided
to go there on a whim. Of course, I speak no Spanish and knew no one
there, but I didn’t see that as being a problem. It wasn't, and Barcelona
is amazing. I made friends at the bar the first night, who were actually
Chilean but had been living there for 6 months. They showed me around and
let me stay at their house instead of the stupid hostel where everyone
insisted on asking me if I was backpacking around Europe (NO!). The one
kid who sort of spoke English looked like Edward Norton, but more
importantly, watched my stuff for me while I skated.
Spain is awesome because beer was the same price as
water and the city is a fricken skatepark. Everything is skateable, you
never get kicked out and there are about a million skateboarders there
from all over the world. Oh an NO little kids. The food there: not so
awesome. It’s actually like they swept the bottom of the ocean floor,
boiled the contents and then put it over rice. But it is close to Italy,
so I found gelato and everything was ok.
On April 10th I flew back to Vermont, where it had gotten warm and sunny and the outdoor skateparks had opened and despite my beliefs that I had stuck to all winter, people actually do skateboard. After returning to Vermont I learned that reality TV stars including Brad, Katie and CT from the Real World/Road Rules and American Idol wanabee Ryan Star were at Spring Loaded. I mean, I was there when Terje and Brushie used to show up, but that’s not nearly as cool. But at least I know, that’s almost as good as being there.
On April 23rd, Kevin was doing sound for a Wyclef Jean show in Middlebury of all places. He got us free tickets and I managed to sneak a camera in my telling the guy it was “broken.” Not that I took any pictures but that was one of the highlights of the night. Anyway, I have now seen De Le Soul at Green Mountain College, Run DMC at Castleton State and Wyclef at Middlebury, so the Vermont hip hop experience is almost complete. To finish out the month, I headed south to the Sunshine State, where as the moniker would have you believe, it was sunny. There was also a wakeboard contest, which was awesome because I got to watch boys change all day long. Orlando is aiight and I did some skateboarding, did some drinking for Patrick’s birthday, and was warm when I said goodbye to April, the best month ever. -Brooke
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