First place losers.

SECOND place are the first losers. Let's admit it, we lost. Zero and the Chris Cole juggernaut killed it, and we came in second. But that's not so bad; way better than I thought we would do. Don't get me wrong, the Habitat boys are killers, but going head-to-head with the big dogs seemed a bit daunting. I knew that Element would be spearheaded by the unstoppable Mike Vallely. Seasoned by the road and versed in the art of get-up-and-go all day, every day, Mike V would have his camp in top shape and going for the gold. Flip, on the other hand, was a whole other animal. I thought Geoff Rowley would be their spark plug; throw Bastien and Arto in the mix and you had full-blown contenders. And then there was Zero, the reigning champs. Jamie Thomas was not going to let Zero lose their title, and Chris Cole is a walking, breathing, one-man army. As for Habitat, we were the ultimate underdogs, the team to fill the loser's spot and the guys who didn't stand a chance. We were the MOtley Crtie of skating with Fred Gall, Danny Garcia, Kerry Getz, Stefan Janoski, Silas Baxter-Neal, Brennan Conroy (filmer), myself (photographer), and Tony Heitz (team manager). We were to start in Portland, OR, and make our way across the country to New York City.

TEAM HABITAT PORTLAND, OR CHALLENGES

Take Pigpen out for a steak

Everyone must grind the big howl frontside

Freshest dude on the team gets a goth makeover from Ethan Fowler

PORTLAND & BEYOND

BURNSIDE RIPS! A true haven for the red-blooded skrog and one of the last bastions of skate freedom. It's a cement sculpted playground for the gnar-dog in us all, and a great starting point for King of the Road. Hailing from Eugene, OR, only two hours south of Portland, Silas had plenty of experience rolling through Burnside and the guys took his cue. It can be pretty intimidating the first time you skate there, with locals flying by faster than you'll ever go and every square inch changing up on you. But we were on the first-day high and everything seemed possible. Our team challenge for Portland was to frontside grind the big bowl at Burnside, buy Pigpen a steak, and get a Goth makeover from Ethan Fowler. Simple, right? You would think so. But our handicap was now apparent--and Brennan was that fucking guy. "You mean you can't do a frontside grind in the bowl?" I screeched at him, almost feeling sorry for him that he was going to lose our team challenge (but not really). "What good are you?"

"Dude, I didn't come on this trip to skate!" he replied. "I didn't know this was how King of the Road was going to be!" Pure silence ensued. With white knuckles and a few Greg Carroll breathing exercises, I calmly walked to the van and simmered in our defeat. And this was day one.

We tracked down Pigpen at a campsite outside Lincoln City and headed down for a quick 'Q and a day at the park. After buying 20 steaks, ears of corn, and a few 30-packs at the grocery store, we fired it up for the whole park and tried a few spine tricks to boot. Fakie heelflip over a spine? Suck it. We had actually heard that was one of the tricks to do the day before KOTR started, and we thought we were being sneaky when Kerry pulled it over the two-foot spine at Burnside. Little did we know that it had to be over a spine four-feet or taller. Close enough we thought. Dan Drehobl, Darren Navarrette, Peter Hewitt, and Alex Horn were also at the park and we were stoked to see them skate. Schmitty, the Thrasher web monkey posting all the daily updates for KOTR, was there filming all the Vox mayhem. The Vertical Vampire is a beast.

An hour or so drive down the coast we got a flat tire in the town of Waldport. Luckily we got to skate the park there while the tire was being fixed. Silas pulled the rocket drop-in, Freddy kickflipped 50-50 to fakie, and Stefan started to figure out the back tailslide frontside revert. When Tony came back to the park with the van, Brennan and Kerry started throwing out stickers to a handfull of little kids. Kerry thought it would be funny if he told the kids to piss their pants and then he'd give them free T-shirts. Picture the scenario--a big van with tinted windows, a bearded man with a video camera filming 12-year-old kids pissing their pants, and getting free stuff to do it. What do you expect normal parents to think? We found out the next day that Schmitty and the boys had gone to Waldport after us and interviewed one of the kids for the Thrasher website. The kid told him that some of the parents got bugged out and called the cops, thinking that we were a van full of pedophiles. Of course Schmitty posted it on the site in big letters, "Habitat Pedophiles," and started an even bigger stink when parents from all over the country started calling Thrasher about having pedophiles on their website. Good job, Schmitty!

AFTER SKATING EUGENE for half a day, we had to make our way to Denver, CO, a 20-hour drive. Stefan suggested "we should go to UC Davis and skate the rails there. They're perfect and we could get some of the six- to 10-stair rail tricks out of the way." UC Davis is next to Sacramento, CA, which was eight hours due south of where we were and just as far from Denver as Eugene. So, no forward geographical progression. But the road was calling and we hadn't really grasped how short two weeks was to travel across the country. Fuck it. Let's go!

After a brutal eight hours we pulled straight up to the rails and mapped out our path to victory, only to be shut down by security sitting there waiting for us. Defeated. Morale took a sudden drop until Stefan took us to the other side of the school where we skated a perfect ledge for about two hours. Sacto wasn't a total loss, though, 'cause the next day we hooked up with Omar Salazar, Judd Hertzler, and Ped to skate a sketchy ditch where Silas took a rusty nail to the forearm. A few Tetanus shots later we found ourselves at a dirt cliff jump into the Sacto River, where Omar became my new favorite person. Hanging onto a rope and swinging around completely out of control, Omar reminded me of a young Cardiel-meets-Dustin-Dollin hybrid. We tried to talk him into coming on the rest of the trip with us, but to no avail.

GOTH BOY

OUR FIRST CHALLENGES were in Portland, OR. and one of them was that "The freshest dude on the team gets a Goth makeover from Ethan Fowler." After the recent Matix ads we decided that D Gar is the freshest dude, so we tracked Ethan down and headed off to the store he had in mind for Danny's gear. After watching Danny try on a plethora of outfits, Ethan chose one and after also picking out the appropriate accessories to go along with it--dog collar, mesh shirt with holes, black nail polish, the tightest vinyl pants ever, and lacy gloves--we went back to Mr Fowler's house to finalize the challenge. Once the gear and a final touch to his hair was in place, courtesy of Ethan, our mission was accomplished. The crew headed off to Burnside to work on the next challenge: Danny in full Goth garb grinding the big bowl frontside.

TEAM HABITAT DENVER, CO CHALLENGES

X-TREME DAY: ride the Denver park on something with wheels besides a skateboard-EVERYONE must film a trick

Find Windsor James and have him show everyone how to iron their jeans then EVERYONE irons their jeans

Find and skate this spot

DENVER, CO

WE ARRIVED IN DENVER 28 hours after we left Sacto, a bit more road-weary and mentally scared. After suffering through two blown tires, sleep deprivation, a wrong turn in the Rocky Mountains, a few make-out sessions with road lizards, and tons of beef jerky, we made it to the Mile High. Find Windsor James and have him show us how to iron our jeans, skate the Winona Hips, and rip the Denver park with something other than a skateboard were our team challenges. No problem we thought, once again. But nothing on King of the Road was actually as easy as it seemed. The elusive Windsor James became our arch nemesis, with tons of failed meetings and miscommunications. We waited around for him half the time we were in Denver. But as the saga continues the legend grows, and luckily Bucky and the SWAB/1086 crew were our gracious hosts and showed us a ton of fun spots.

The Winona Hips and the X-Games park--don't ask--were the highlights of our stay in Denver, After being denied several 7-Eleven stops, we pulled up to an unassuming neighborhood and jumped into one of the sickest ditch/water-gap/jump-ramp-to-bank spots that I had ever seen. With a small waterfall that levels out to a creek, you could roll down a bank next to the waterfall and launch at an angle over the creek. Silas bucked a massive kickflip over the water and Stefan sailed a beaut of a frontside flip off the kicker to the fiat bank. This just happened to be Freddy's Dave Duncan day, and with bullhorn in hand Double D would have been proud. As the boys rolled, Freddy announced to the local spracks their every move with a hypnotic vigor. As the rain crept over the mountains, Silas tried to frontside flip the water and ended up chest deep in the sludge. The funniest bail of the trip, without a doubt. But running from the rain left us no choice but to head indoors, and the ESPN park at the mall was all that was available. At least it had a spine, and we did have a spine page to fill. While D-Gar (Daniel Garcia) back tailed to 180 blunt transfer over the spine, Freddy worked on his frontside inverts on the big mini. With Dagger vest in tow and hair down, Freddy got straight Steadham and landed a proper Miller flip and front invert. Not bad for a fat Jersey boy on his first day learning inverts! The spine got murdered with Kerry's Cab, Stefan's frontside half-Cab and back disaster front rock transfer in a run, Silas' Schultesesque Smith grind feeble transfer, and Freddy's Sal flip to fakie over the spine. We pretty much took care of our whole spine page in less then an hour, minus the fakie heel. Whatever, Denver was great but the time to trek forward had come, and a massive rendezvous in Louisville, KY, was next on the agenda.

WINDSOR JAMES

Windsor, huh. After first contact we thought he was working for the Element team and avoiding us. It took us three days of tracking to finally meet up with him. Over that time his name was said hundreds of times to the point of him becoming our invisible mascot during our stay in Denver. We even spoke of him as if he didn't actually exist. Inevitably we met up with him, dressed in a giant yellow polo and nicely-pressed jeans, and he denied every bit of flakiness. He was a trip; we went from hating him to him being our boy in minutes. Worst dude to best dude. Colorado Springs represent.

TEAM HABITAT LOUISVILLE, KY CHALLENGES

Pick up Mystery Guest

Show up on with Aug.Mystery 15tb Guest at Louisville park by 10pm on Aug. 15th

Nominate one member to compete in the sticker pasting challenge

EVERYONE must perform a benihana somewhere at the Louisville park

METAL FROM HERE ON OUT

THE PARK IN LOUISVILLE has to be one of the raddest 'crete structures in the whole country, and when you have a gathering on this scale you know it'll be a banger. All the teams had to meet here, benihana their little hearts out, pick up their mystery guests, and paste some stickers in the pipe. If you've done benihanas before you know you'll never do one again, and if you haven't done one by now you know you never wanted to do one in the first place. I did my first and last one on my 50th try. Good riddance. As for the rest of the Habitaters they had no problems, and Louisville became a ripping all-day skate.

Some of the dudes there were definitely in tune with the lines of the park. Lee Bender from Arizona was blazing fast and was my favorite to watch. There was a Phelps look-a-like doing damage on the back-and-forth vert section, and the two mini local kids skated so damn gnarly it put everyone to shame. Actually, a few beers later and everyone was ripping in my mind. While the peanut gallery on the hill heckled the entire city, Lou Metal and his crew showed up from Dirty Jersey and held down the parking lot. Lou's a legend on the East Coast and one of Freddy's best friends, so with him around Freddy's a bit more on point. Or so you'd think. Lou had mapped out the rest of the trip east for us and promised he'd make sure we'd win. He reconned a pool in York, PA, and knew lots of spots in Jersey and New York City for us to skate. After picking up our OG mystery guest, the American Nomad Bill Danforth, we hit the road late at night and headed for our next city, Washington, DC. Ah, home.

PHELPS AT LOUISVILLE

ALLEGEDLY PHELPS was blamed for shooting a kid in the chest with a Roman candle. After sitting up on the hill in the peanut gallery all day, nearly anything can happen. I was standing down near our van when Jake comes running towards me, yelling, "Get me in the van--and take me OUT OF HERE!"

Before I could say "schtoops!" a guy almost tackles Jake and starts screaming at the cops that were surrounding the place. "Here's the guy! He shot my boy with a firearm!"

Being arrested and cuffed is sort of par for the course for the old Phelper, but it was the kid that I felt bad for. You see, he probably didn't care about being shot, it was all in good fun, but his parents tripped out and all the locals at the park started telling the kid never to come back to the park or he'd get his ass kicked. After a little schmoozing with the pigs, Jake was driven to the airport and told never to come back to Kentucky. No jail time

TEAM HABITAT WASHINGTON, DC CHALLENGES

Skate Pulaski with Andy Stone and/or Carlos "Pooch" Kenner

Session the gold rail

Get a photo where you appear to be ollieing over the Washington monument 

WASHINGTON, DC

AFTER SWERVING OUR WAY through the back roads of West Virginia, we hit Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of the nation's capital. The Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the exercise stairs were all laid out in front of us. In DC everything is marble and all the cops are federal police--a lethal combination for skaters. Everything you want to skate is government property. Go figure. A late-night call to Chris Hall and before we knew it we were checking out spots at three in the morning. The gold rail, first skated by Scan Sheffey, was on our list of team challenges. Right around the corner from our hotel, we hit it up a few times between getting kicked out and deciding to skate some manual pads instead. We were looking for a really short manual to try a Casper slide so Chris took us to a random one in the middle of the street a few blocks up. After waxing the shit out of the thing, Silas attacked and started getting into a few Caspers. Everything was going good until a cop pulled up. Then another. Then another. All in all there were eight cop cars blocking the street within two minutes and they were all heading our way. It seems the manual pad we were skating was right in front of the Iranian Embassy, and the cops were making sure we weren't terrorists. Only in DC.

NAKED FREDDY

IN ALL MY YEARS as team manager there is no male I have seen naked more times than Fred Gall. He seems to enjoy running around and skating in the buff, So inevitably when there is a "skate naked" challenge, Fred gets the call. Our first time experiencing this on KOTR was at a bank-to-wall in Portland. Fred decided to get naked and wallride. This wouldn't have been such a funny moment had Kerry not jumped out of the van, grabbed a camera, and got naked himself to film the trick. Anyone driving by had to get a kick out of two grown men filming and skateboarding in the nude. The other challenge was the gnarliest trick naked. Again, Fred was recruited. This time it was at a 13-foot deep pool in York, PA. After making multiple finger-flip lien to tails, we egged him on to do it naked. We had a pretty good idea that this would take the 50 points, so after very little encouragement from us Fred stripped down. He made two of three attempts, and the points were ours.

THE NEXT MORNING, we realized we were falling behind schedule. We had to take care of our shit pronto and get on the road. Our last mission in DC was to skate Pulaski with Andy Stone and then break the fuck out! When Andy showed up to Pulaski it was a full-blown reunion of sorts. Steve Teague and Brian Tucci were there along With Chris Hall, Andy, and myself, who haven't been all together in about 16 years. Chris told us there was a recent article in the Washington Post about a skateboarder whose favorite place to skate was Pulaski, so ever since then the cops have been in full force and chasing skaters out with a vengeance. We surprisingly got to skate there for about half-an-hour, and Andy was on point. He manual kickflip manualed the whole ledge, first try. Pulaski was before both EMB and Love Park, and it's just as good now as it ever was. Go.

Philly was next, and this was Kerry's turf. A quick two-hour drive north, straight to the Burn-y-side ledges under the bridge for a full-bore skate. I wish we had had more time in Philly 'cause this is an amazing city to skate around. You've seen it in the videos but that doesn't do it justice. Ricky O is a sight to see. After knocking out a few points on the ledges we crept over to the Ikea manuals and came head to head with the Flip team. They were on their way to New York and stopped through Philly with the same mission as us. While we pulled out the generator and lights for the good manual (we were there first so we started skating the better of two manuals), the Flip squad high beamed the other one way across the parking lot. It's kind of weird how King of the Road is a head-to-head battle with other teams and skaters that are your friends. After a few bullhorn callouts and jeers, the Flippers finally came over and skated the manual pad with us. It was the first time of the trip that we ran into another team and had a chance to just hang out and shoot the shit. Good times all around. After our boys chalked up a few points, Flip's TM, Luke, came through with the fakie one-foot manual big spin out and got us all hyped. Cheers, mate! With only two days left we started feeling our second wind coming, so we called it quits for the night and headed to the hotel for some rest.

The next morning we drove out to York to meet up with Lou Metal and his posse to skate an old country club's abandoned pool. Lou had been there all night draining the thing and making sure we'd get our pool page handled in a day. The best pools are the ones hidden away, the ones only the diehards know how to get to. The Blair Witch pool didn't let us down. Walking through the woods down an overgrown path, we finally stumbled upon a large opening with a huge Olympic-sized square about 13-feet deep. Freddy got so charged that all his boys were there that he dove fight in and set the tone for the next couple of hours. Danforth hadn't set his board down before rock and rolls, front rocks, body jars, frontside roll-ins, slob airs and Smith stalls had been laid to waste. But one thing I've come to learn over all these years is that old schoolers have perfected their craft, and there's nothing like it. Word on the street is that Salba has a grind-the-first-wall rule whenever he skates a new pool. Try that on a rail every time you find a new one. Danforth finally mongoed in and went through a sampling of his repertoire--front rocks with style, layback grinds, and the blunt mute in. Everyone hollered, everyone screamed, everyone was stoked. Pool page done, except the frontside carve over shallow stairs, 'cause there weren't any.

TEAM HABITAT NEW YORK CITY CHALLENGES

Turn in footage to Jake Phelps Aug. 19th between 11:30 and 11:59 pm in Times Square (Broadway and 7th in front of the jumbo-tron)

FREDDY'S MOM & TATTOOS

AFTER A MADDENING DRIVE after Albany, tension is high in the van. We don't have a hotel booked yet, I cannot stand driving in NYC, and Fred keeps rattling on about a hotel in NJ. Finally we concede to Fred's idea after much arguing and drive to Dirty Jerzey to get into the hotel as the sun's coming up. Only one day left and we awake to rain. Kerry front boards the rail into the hotel's pool and we're off to accomplish as many non-skating challenges as possible. First we find a cop to ollie a board in his uniform. We should get double points for him doing it in the rain as well as his boots. Then Fred makes a call to his mom; she lines up a tattoo for Dawes at her friend's shop. As Lance is getting his tattoo, Fred's mom--in an effort to help us--bites the bullet and makes out with Brennan to give us four 40 year old make outs. Again, double points should be given for Fred's mom being involved.

END OF THE ROAD

OUR FINAL DAY was spent m a rain-soaked Jersey suburb chasing down cops that could skate, alter boys, tattoo parlors, and any dry patch we could find to get a few extra points. The road had been long and hard and everyone in the van was burnt. Silas and Freddy tried to keep the dream alive to the eleventh hour, but the doors were getting ready to slam shut. Freddy's boy knew a cop that would try to ollie a board for us. You should have seen this guy: six-foot-four, a solid 260 with a size 15 boot. In the rain. Trying to ollie a deck with no trucks or wheels to make it lower to the ground. He pretty much pulled it but we left it up to the judges to decide. While I was getting Skate and Destroy inked on my leg, Freddy's mom was outside making out with Brennan. She was a good sport and just trying to get her son a few extra points. What you going to do? But we were out of time. We had to drive to New York City, do a quick edit of the footage, check into the hotel, and make it to Times Square by the stroke of midnight. It was the end of the line for King of the Road, and not a day to soon.

Let me take that back. You see, it should have lasted for a month. We had a great time on the road skating new places and doing a lot of tricks we wouldn't have normally tried. I think it proved to the guys that they're capable of skating better than they thought. It just takes effort. D-Gar found his tranny legs, Freddy did a frontside invert, Stefan blew his own mind half the time with some of the tricks he landed, and the same went for Kerry. Silas was the team MVP. We got to witness the American Nomad in person and skated some killer spots. Can't wait 'til next year.