Brooke’s Best Month EverJanuaryYou know that phenomenon where you are never happy where you are, but as soon as you leave, you realize it was the best place ever? Well, I do. It is the story of my life. But in January, I solved this issue by just traveling constantly, more or less avoiding reality and boredom, and most importantly, the winter in Burlington.
I had rung in the new year by giving Mike Mahoney corn rows. I'm mentioning this just because I need a picture for the beginning of this story. But On Jan. 7th the magic began. As part of my job working for the man, I get to go to one contest a season where I am supposed to interview people and generally build a rapport with people in the industry. Because even though it seems like someone in my position would already have a rapport with their industry, most people who do my job don’t. But I do, so I spend that time hanging out, snowboarding, skateboarding and drinking. So my first adventure was of this nature, to the Grand Prix at Mt. Bachelor. Of course, the travel department has little to no regard for my convenience or happiness, so my flight to Oregon included a four hour layover in Chicago and arrived in Portland at 7 pm, at which point I was supposed to drive 3 hours, through a snow storm, to the contest. Since that didn’t sound that awesome to me, I decided to take advantage of my plethora of friends and just do fun stuff. So in Chicago I hopped on the el and went to get the best falafels ever in Wicker Park. I met up with my friend Ricky and made a half hearted attempt to check my email, and four hours was killed, just like that. When I got to Portland I headed straight to Department of Skateboarding, got rad, and then went to the bar. Needless to say I missed about half of the contest the next day, but I did pretend to watch and get my work done despite it all. I heard this nasty rumor that the Northwest didn’t get snow this season, but Bachelor knew I was coming, so it was dumping the whole weekend. Bad for a pipe contest, good for me. So I rode powder instead of watching boardercross qualifiers. On the way back to Vermont, my Chicago layover proved to be quite entertaining once again. My neighbor Chaka happened to be on the same flight as me, and seeing as we had the same layover and he had a corporate card, it was only natural to hit up the airport bar, so we did. There we drank beers and apparently entertained the entire bar, because the bartender gave us free shots of Patrone and some guy told us we were a great couple. To which Chaka replied, “Don’t tell my girlfriend.”
Fast forward to January 16th. Having been home for nearly a week I was more than ready to take another trip. Luckily, the magazine I work for had asked me to come out to California to go on a skate trip to Mexico. Now the way magazine trips and me work is that I get asked to go on them, buy the necessary plane tickets, and then the trip gets cancelled for whatever reason. This trip was no different, but I was over the idea of having a ton of credit that I would never actually use for my ticket and decided to go to California for basically no reason.
As we’ve already established, I’ve got mad peeps all over, and one of my California peeps happens to be really nice. He was going to be out of town for most of the time I was there, so he lent me his car and house keys and it was on. At some point, Southern California started to get fun skateparks, so I took advantage of them. Chino, The Etnies Park, Long Beach, Glendale and the Volcom park, which is private, but again, I’ve got mad peeps. After a week of skateboarding and getting a tan, it was time to fly back to Vermont in order to catch my flight to Colorado for the X Games two days later. But unfortunately, the blizzard of 2005 decided to hit NYC, where my flight connected. My flight was cancelled and I sat in the Long Beach airport a bit concerned, since I have a tendency to miss X Games for various reasons. But I called my people over at ESPN travel and they begrudgingly booked a flight from So Cal to Aspen. Of course, I got to Colorado with my skateboard and no jacket, but at least I made it. Luckily, Yobeat’s lifesteez editor Kevin also works for the man and he brought me my snowboard and even packed extra underwear, and everything was wonderful. And that brings me to the event in Aspen which Yobeat is banned from. Since I was working the whole time, I only had time to snowboard and drink most days, but I did my best. I did get one of my coworkers so drunk that he puked all night and poached the halfpipe once. I also introduced super beer to the X Games research department, which reminds me, I should drink that more often, and had an Italian boardercrosser buy me dinner. And of course, there was the time when we found the keys to the locked closet in our condo and had a fashion show of retro Aspen fashions, which has already been immortalized on this site.
And that was Aspen, where I was supposed to leave on the last day of January. But of course, my flight got cancelled and I ended up there until February 1st. And that was , January, the best month ever. -Brooke Geery |
