Down in Kokomo

On the road again. GPS sent me a different route than I've been traveling for the last year and a half, which I questioned and tested several times with the same result. It was nice to go down a different road at least. I stopped at the Kokomo park for a chilly session. There was snow on the ground when I left home but by the time I got to Kokomo it had warmed up a little (38 degrees according to my car). The park there is so gnarly. I feel bad for the locals. They got this park, which clearly cost a lot of money and took a lot of effort to build, but it's so burly that only an expert level skater or bike ride can even really ride it. It's a series of bowls and the elbowed full pipes, all super steep (giant coping on every single lip) and all connected. It's really fun to carve around and haul ass through the bowls but it is gnar gnar. Just rolling in is like deep-breath-here-we-go and hold on tight. Even in the shallow part. Rolling out of the bowls takes concentration or you'll end up stalling out and falling back in. I'm going to stray here, but I can't stop thinking about this. I have two distinct memories of riding Cosmic Waves Skatepark in Kalamazoo. 1980-ish, skateboarding was nose-diving in popularity and the local skatepark finally started letting bikes in. I went there whenever I could (I wanted to skateboard but was so into BMX there was no way my old man was shelling out for an Alva Pig board). One time I went with the Hux brothers and there was this huge bowl with a giant roll in, like a path down a hill to this bowl. We would fly out of the bowls and into the dirt. I flew out and Eddie Hux hit it next. Eddie came up a little slow and I remember looking him right in the eyes as he stalled out and rolled back into the giant bowl, totally eating shit. The other time, Ted Lowis tried to fly out of the vert pool (not a lot different than Kokomo) and just flew back in, kind of half bailing, half hanging on, wadding himself up in the flat bottom. He was bummed.
I digress, the Kokomo stop broke up the trip and Rocky Flair Jr. got to trot around for a bit. He's a good companion on the road.