Having been born and raised in Nor Cal, I find it difficult to get myself down to the southern half of our great state, whatever the reason. Yeah I know that there is a ton of shit to skate and the people are tan and beautiful, blah blah blah, but when confronted with the idea of being stuck in a car for 8 hours, I would rather end up in the concrete paradise that is Oregon rather than LA or San Diego. The only catch with going to Oregon is that it is off limits for six months between October and March or April, unless you like riding your skateboard in the rain. So Cal, on the other hand, offers semi-sunny, semi-warm weather year around, and seeing as how it was cold and rainy in the Bay Area, we opted to head south for the winter. Old man Sam Cunningham is always going somewhere for a weekend road trip, he has trips lined up weeks and months ahead of time and is always ready to barge it. This time he was going to Ventura to visit his friend Frank Atwater, so Dave “Video Goon” Amell and myself decided to tag along.
Ventura is actually (and thankfully) in the northernmost tip of what can be considered LA, and is actually a surf town more reminiscent of Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz than Los Angeles. But Frank was claiming that we could stay at his house and that he had a shitload of pools lined up, so it seemed like a no brainer. The story was slightly different when we actually arrived in Ventura on a Friday night at 11pm though. Frank did not actually have his own place, and was staying with friends who weren’t all that keen on 3 smelly guys they didn’t know crashing at their place for the weekend. And there was only one pool, not a shitload. We ended up crashing at a Frank’s friend’s house on Friday night, who were more than hospitable to us and more than willing to take our money at the dice game. The next morning, after some heated sessions of the ever popular, ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto 3, we were ready to steal a car, kill some cops, and shoot some pedestrians at point blank with shotguns. Oops, I mean go to breakfast and go skate some new terrain. The first spot that Frank took us to was one of the shittiest skateparks I have ever seen. It was called the Avenue or some-
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