South west excursion: the label gets lost.

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I'VE BEEN TRYING to get a Black Label trip going for a while, and after coming in third on KOTR, Lucero was psyched to get in on my offer. It's that time of year to hit up Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. We picked the crew: Jason Adams, Chet Childress, Adam Alfaro, Josh Watkins, and Shuriken Shannon, while Chet snuck A1 Partanen in the van as the stowaway. No one complained. It's always good to take a wild card along even though they don't ride for the company. Lucero didn't give a fuck, and he gave AI half of Chet's per-diem for inviting him. Good on ya!

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JUST FOR THE RECORD, if you're ever driving from San Diego, CA, to Phoenix, AZ, DO NOT bring weed. Period. That checkpoint when you get into Arizona state has been making a fortune off of skateboarders going there. I'm not going to drop names here, but they're brutal and it's not cheap. Ask Omar. The dog goes through all of your stuff and literally climbs in your vehicle. I'm not sure if it's legal, but clean your car out and leave the ganja at home. There's plenty when you get there.

Arizona is so close to California that everyone goes there during the winter and spring. That's why we had to hit it and split within just a short time. It was hot as usual during the day, with the sun beating down on you. We skated a few parks, got drunk with Wez Lundry, skated some pools, and saw more tweakers than we needed to deal with. One guy in Circle K asked Chet if he could give him a ride to his house. He only lived a block away. We stayed in the crappiest Motel 6's so nobody on the team would get comfortable chilling at the hotel. Cops were there at all hours of the day and night breaking up domestic disputes. It's crazy, but it's actually very entertaining, to say the least. Once you've hit the newer spots, been to your favorite parks, and managed to be at the Palo Verde bar three nights in a row, you know it's time to go.

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OUR MISSION on this trip was to try and do some concrete work on some spot that might be a bit easier to skate or open up, so to speak. Our first one was in Arizona (Chet Childress bluntslide photo); it was Partanen, Childress, Lee Dog, and myself. We ended up at Home Depot a half hour before closing, and Danger, who works for Grindline, happened to call as we were deciding what to buy. It couldn't have been a better time for him to call A1. He instructed us on what to buy, which helped a great deal. We headed to the spot, set the lights up, and tried to figure out just what to do. "It should take about two hours max," we thought, "And then we'll stop by the bar and have a few beers with Wez."

Well, all of a sudden a cop shows up, shining his spotlight on us. I walked over to him, and while almost standing on the wet concrete with a waist high wall between us, offered up a "Hello, officer." He asked what we were doing and that he could see the bags of concrete, lights, generator, supplies, and said everything. "Are you guys tagging?" he asked. I explained to him that some kids did some concrete work here and we were just smoothing it out because they didn't know what they were doing. He then spotted the beer cans that we'd thrown into the ditch, beer still flowing out of them because he'd rolled up so quickly. "Are you guys drinking beer? Are those your cans?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," I replied.

"Well, I received a call from a passerby who said there were some kids tagging in the ditch," the officer said. I told him the last thing we would be doing was spray painting a ditch at night, especially with it lit up like a Christmas tree. He believed us and apologized--not once, but twice--for wasting our beers like that, and said, "Have a nice evening." We rolled back to the hotel at 5 am, about five hours later than we expected. Chet and A1 took care of business the next day, and the concrete is still holding up from what I hear.

We decided to head towards E1 Paso, TX (the "Barcelona of Texas" as Chet calls it), but we didn't realize how cold it was going to be. We stopped to skate a fullpipe that we found on Route 66 a few years ago, but the pipe had frozen ice on the bottom of it because the sun never hits it. "Maybe we should have stayed in Arizona," we thought. One day we skated El Paso while it was 44 degrees. Damn.

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WE HAVE A GOOD FRIEND out there named Jamie who has a pool in his yard and has been skating for years. He always hooks us up with different ditches that he grew up skating, and with newer ones that he finds. A real host. One night while we were over at his house we had a taco party. Yes, he cooked up 80 came asada tacos and bought four 30-packs of beer. He said we were pussies if we couldn't handle all of it. Let's just say we had to go back in the morning for breakfast! It's a hard place to leave with hospitality like that, but he knows we'll always be back.

From there we headed down to Albuquerque, NM, the home of infamous Rocky Norton. The weather was a bit warmer, but the nights were still in the 40s. We only got one night in of drinking beer with Rocky at his house 'cause he was going to be super busy the next day. The weather wasn't the nicest, with rain coming. We skated some ditches, but without a tour guide like him, we figured we needed to get back to Texas.

Austin was the furthest we were going, and our next stop. A few of the team members had never been to Austin and were stoked to get there. We rolled in after dark with everyone psyched to get skating the next day--but we woke up to a full-on rainstorm, which takes a toll on the crew. With nothing else to do and being that the whole Label team likes to drink, that's what we did: drank all day and night. The next day, what happens? It's sunny and nice outside, everyone's hung over, and we only have a few days there before the long drive back to San Diego. But that kind of stuff happens all the time and you just roll with it. There are so many fun things to skate there that you can't get to everything. We got in two days of skating, and on the last day it rained. Time to take the long road back, meaning a two-day bender in the van for the crew.

Next time we may need to start at the finishing point.