We all had to travel on the lowest of budgets so after a bit of research we booked some cheap flights from Charleroi to Riga with Ryanair and took the bus from there to Tallinn. I had been partying the night before we left and as a result was completely wasted. I figured since we’d be travelling all day I would easily be able to sleep a bit along the way. Every time though I could finally catch up on some sleep on the plane or the bus either the clumsy flight-attendant bumped into me with the food car, and the ass did that twice, every time I just managed to fall asleep, or we would get passport control and some rude officer I couldn’t understand would come poke me for my ID. You can’t believe how happy I was to finally arrive at the hotel!

The next two days were practice days and we’d spend all day at the arena. The first day though we immediately messed up. We had gone into town to look for some lunch and a supermarket to get some stash, but we got terribly lost and we arrived way late for Willem’s first two hours of practice leaving him with only half an hour. We decided to stick around to watch the other groups ride and lucky for Willem security wasn’t all that tight so he could sneak onto the course and get some more runs in that first day. Second day went pretty good, too, though I hadn’t slept that well and getting up at 8am for another two hours of morning practice was horrible. This time we were one of the first there and Willem enjoyed the free space that first half hour very much. We stayed again until all BMX practice was over and than went back to the hotel to wait for the rest of the Grounded crew to arrive.

A couple minutes and some google searches later we found out there were two Tallinn City Hotels and we were on opposite sides of the city…

Later that evening we got a text from Brecht (the Grounded TM) that they had arrived at the hotel and we had to come meet them in the lobby. When we got there the lobby was empty though. All a bit confused we called Brecht and a few weird moments later we realized we were in different hotels. A couple minutes and some google searches later we found out there were two Tallinn City Hotels and we were on opposite sides of the city… Why nobody checked this before we left I still don’t get! Both hotels were fully booked though so there was nothing we could do. In the end the other guys were only staying for two nights so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but still was pretty stupid we couldn’t hang out now. It also was Bart’s birthday though on Friday and he was hungry to go out so we got on the bus across town and met up with them at the first Simple Session party for some celebrating. It ended up killing me the following day as the harsh cold and the by then serious lack of sleep had caught up with me. And it hadn’t really been such a great party either so that sucked a little!

Waking up with a terrible headache and a sour swollen throat really made me want to stay in bed, but we headed out to the arena for qualification anyway and I struggled myself through the day trying to focus on taking some good pictures. Willem was stressed as always at such a big comp so his first run wasn’t verry good, but in his second visit he was clearly over it and rode a really good run. He ended up finishing in 74th, which doesn’t seem all that great, but if you know he rode against the best of the world and you see who finish under him or barely a few point above him it was pretty impressive and obviously he was stoked.

Like Catfish raves all day on his mic, when you visit Tallinn you get an overdose of beautiful women and this club was no exception. It was stuffed with ‘em!

I can’t report on the Saturday party as I was crashing hard at the hotel that night and probably slept for like 11 hours straght, but from what I heard from the rest of the crew I missed the best party of the weekend. I couldn’t care less though ’cause Sunday I felt a lot better and was ready to see some crazy stuff during the finals. I’m not going to get into details of what went down as that has been all over the web already when we hadn’t even sobered up from the afterparty sunday, but history got written that night. The two tricks I can clearly remember are the insane cliffhangers that crazy Pat Casey was firing out all weekend, and of course the amazing no-handed cashroll Brett “Maddog” Banasiewicz pulled of as his last trick like he did them all day every day. That kid is so smooth!

It was Drew Bezanson though who took the win yet again this year, the judges and the crowd both love this guy. He has so much control over his bike, sees crazy lines that no one would ever think of doing and does both the crazy tech stuff like the icepick to footjam on that huge vertwall, as the big complete mental tricks like his huge tailwhip drop, first trick of his final run, and the caveman and bars to ice way up on the judges tower. A deserved winner for sure and if you want to get all the good stuff that has been posted of this years edition in one place, go check out the Simple Session’s website. The got it all there!

Sunday night was an insane afterparty! Like Catfish raves all day on his mic, when you visit Tallinn you get an overdose of beautiful women and this club was no exception. It was stuffed with ‘em! You also get to congratulate the riders in person as they are all hanging out and you even get to witness some of your heroes go completely nuts, drunk as hell. Good times!

We stayed two extra days to check out the city and go play tourist and shop a little, and it was great on the one hand as Tallinn truly is an awesome city and it looks almost fairy tale like in winter with all the snow, but on the other hand it’s so damn cold and we all returned home with a huge cold which wasn’t all that fun. Overall I had a blast though and I’d probably return next year if I could, maybe even come out this summer for the Summer session… We’ll see! Enjoy the clicking through the pictures, I brought back a ton and I’m pretty stoked on how they turned out!

The Schildpadhoeve (Turtleranch) in Retie, a small town near Antwerp, was the venue of this year’s edition. It rained a bit as is usual here in the fall, but all in all weather was pretty good. We managed again to get down the usual mix of rehearsals of running big pieces with a little bit of lighter fun music in between and the group games we play with the whole bunch. I definitely had a blast!

I also brought my camera along to shoot some pictures. They already got displayed at our annual members banquet, but they will be used at our Winterconcert the 8th of January in some way too. I’m pretty stoked on how they came out. I think they really captured the atmosphere.

I was staying at the Gran Camping de Zarautz in the BoardX camp. I was there for the first two weeks of September. The best time of the year to be there really. It’s still nice and warm most of the time, the chances for good waves are already a bit higher than in mid summer, there are no high school kids because their summer break has already ended and for the crew that runs the camp it’s their last two weeks as well so parties are extra wild.

My first week was more like an internship. I paid only a third of the regular price, got some clothes and a backpack and had a free pass for the bar and the kitchen. In exchange I worked a couple shifts during the week, but I had plenty of time left to hit the water and pretty much partied hard every night. There were lots of hot girls and they practically always ran around in bikini or at most some low cut tops and really short shorts, we had great waves for almost the entire week with just enough power for an adrenaline rush when standing up and a big splash after you whipe out, but not big enough to get you too scared to even try to drop in on them as a rookie. With BoardX’s big boss Joe V and surf teacher T-man behind the turntables as Les Miami Punque and, at least for me, an open bar, obviously the parties were pretty sick too. Unfortunately this meant I hardly got any sleep and I pretty quickly got a bit sick. It wasn’t enough to keep me in bed though, I could sleep it off when I got back home.

They practically always ran around in bikini or at most some low cut tops and really short shorts.

The second week I stayed as a regular camper. This meant I lost my special privileges, but I would have a lot more time to have fun. One of my best friends drove up that second week as well and that meant the party mode would definitely stay on full throttle. I surfed with him once the day he arrived and we had a second session together on day two, but that would be it for this year. The BoardX guys had built a really cool small mini ramp at the camp and we had been skating a little the first week, me and some other guys from the crew. I hadn’t been skating for a couple of years though and was still getting used to it again. My friend, who had been skating for a couple of years and still had his board laying around, brought it with him as well and we ended in the mini ramp after diner on sunday. We skated a little bit and I started trying some lip tricks.

I got a little overconfident because I could land a couple of them and kept going. One particular go I lost my balance though and the board rolled from under me and I came down really hard on my side and brutally dislocated my shoulder. It hurt like hell and I spend almost an hour driving to the medical centre in one of the BoardX vans and from there in an ambulance to the hospital in San Sebastian before they could put it back in on ER. Only the doctor who helped me put my arm back in spoke a little English so I didn’t got much information, but she told me not to move the shoulder and keep my arm in the sling they gave me for three weeks. After that I had to see an orthopaedic surgeon to see how it healed and to determine whether it had to be operated or not. Surfing was over, that was certain and the chance you’ll ever see me on a skateboard again dropped to zero as well that evening.

The second week was obviously way less crazy than the first because of that crash. I still went to most of the parties though, but I had to be careful because having some random drunk bump into me hurt a lot. My friend and me definitely clocked a lot of time on the Playstation 3 in the camp when the weather gave in a little a few times that week. And on the warm days I pretty much just lay in the sun for most of the day. I got the girls to help me put sunscreen on and made fun of the gossip magazines they were reading. So basically you could say that even with the injury, it was a damn good vacation. I had a blast and will be back next year for sure!

UPDATE – If you like the tagging feature on facebook go HERE.

I’m not that much of a tourist really, but I actually had a lot of fun acting like one when I was out in Paris this summer. It started of more as a joke really. I went there with my brother and his girlfriend on our birthday. We are twins, but non-identical as you’ll probably notice in the pictures, and we hadn’t spend our birthday together the last couple of years so when Thalys started advertising it’s city trip promotions and one of the dates offered was July 23th we just had to go play tourist.

The downside to the promotion was that it was for it’s low traffic departures only, which meant ridiculously early or somewhere in the afternoon. To make the most of our visit we opted for the early one, but I for sure had a ruff time getting out of my cosy bed at 5 in the morning.

My brother Bavo and his girlfriend Fien walking back to the bridge after checking out the tip of the little island.

We arrived in Paris around 9, and decided to start our day with a visit to the Notre Dame. We bought one of those two days passes for public transport and hopped on our first ride in Paris’s famous Metro network. After the Notre Dame we hurried to the Eiffel Tower. We hadn’t kept track of time and we had pre-booked visits and only 20 minutes left to get to the other side of town. We didn’t get there on time, but they didn’t seemed to mind us being about 15 minutes late so we could just get in the elevator and be on our way up. I honestly was amazed be the amount of people that were on those platforms at the same time all the time. It was like a steady flow of tourists the entire time we were up there. Understandable though, the Eiffel Tower really is worth a visit. The view is truly incredible!

They didn’t seemed to mind us being about 15 minutes late so we could just get in the elevator
and be on our way up.

We had been up there for almost two hours and started to get hungry so we went looking for a nice little place to get some lunch. We decided to move more towards the outside of the city, to escape the fuzz for a while. A nice big sandwich and a coke later, we left the little snack-bar we had found and went to check out the Louvre. Again a lot of people, but the amazing architecture is just to good to pass up. I really loved all the little details that are literally everywhere.

This is one of the side halls. It was funny to see how they lit the whole cathedral with street lantern type of lights. It was kind of weird, but then again it was discrete enough not to bother anyone.

From the Louvre we ventured out in to the city in search of a place to go eat some ice cream, but I guess we took a lot of bad turns cause after almost an hour of walking we still hadn’t found anything so we decided to give up the search. We went to look for our hotel to drop our luggage and then headed back in to the city for diner and some Paris by night.

After diner in a nice little restaurant in the Champs-Elysées neighbourhood we ventured out in to the night. Our plan was to take walk on the Champs-Elysées and check out the Arc de Triomphe, take the subway to a station near the river and take a late night boat trip around Paris and then go for a drink. When we arrived at the boats, though, the last one had just left so sadly the only thing we cold do was watch it steer up the Seine. Bummer! After that we decided to just call it a night, we were all pretty tired from getting up so early that morning so we headed back to the hotel for a good night sleep.

My brother just loves Nutella! Okay we faked this shot, but so funny none the less!

The next day started the day with a visit to the Galeries Lafayette. A huge shopping centre in an ancient building. Pretty inpressive really. We had some good laughs playing around in the toys and souvenirs sections. After a nice lunch we visited the Centre Georges Pompidou and wandered around in that neighbourhood for a while. We headed over to the Sacre Coeur and Montmartre after that. From the Montmartre with all it’s painters and illustrators we rode the subway back towards the centre and went looking for a place to get diner. We eventually ended up in a great Italian restaurant and had ourselves a nice big pizza.

When we arrived at the boats, though, the last one had just left so sadly the only thing we cold do was watch it steer up the Seine. Bummer!

Our train back home departed around 22 o’clock so we had a little time left to go back to the Jardin Des Tuileries next to the Louvre for a little walk to round up our trip.

I had a blast in Paris and I think I’ll be going back sometime soon, not for sightseeing, but with my bike and some friends to ride and party. Have you ever been in Paris? Share you stories down below in the comments section!

UPDATE – More photos on facebook! Check it HERE.

I’m sure that you guys already saw a ton of coverage of the event and read a lot of articles about the insane stuff that went down there, so I’m not going to hurt my brains trying to recall some stories somebody else probably already told anyway. If you would like to see a glimpse of the weekend how I saw it, though, I would like to invite you to look at my pictures.

Amazing turndown three. Nicely clicked, bike completely vertical.

What I do want to get off my chest however, is the fact that the organization this year the whole weekend only allowed competing riders on the courses. And yes I know this is the case at most bigger contests these days, but that was the best part of the Masters for me. Previous years as a visitor you brought your bike along, watched your favourite riders go completely nuts and right after that you could get on the course yourself and have a little session with them. Or a chill early mourning session. After a long night of street riding in the city you hit the showers, caught some sleep and got back up a few hours later to get back on your bike for a run or two before the course got to crowded again. That’s how addicted most of us are.

Brett Banasiewicz did these double tailwhips and made it seem easier than just airing over the damned thing.

This year on the other hand on our first early mourning session on friday I got kicked of the park seconds after I ended my first warm-up run, even though only five other riders were on it. Why the hell was that necessary? I do understand that when you ride in the contest you want some room to practice and that previous years the park was a zoo all the time because non-competitors just kept riding even when asked to leave the course.

Kick them off during scheduled practice runs and please do so aggressively if needed. But keep the courses open when nothing is planned.

But there is a golden middle road here. Kick them off during scheduled practice runs and please do so aggressively if needed. But keep the courses open when nothing is planned. Or even plan a jam session or two in there on these moments if you absolutely want to keep control over who’s riding when, but please let us normal visitors ride a little as well. That’s what we like to do and after getting so excited by the amazing riding during the contests not being able to get that energy out afterwards is really frustrating. Please do this differently next year!

Mark Webb who simply refused to ride in super-ramp, did kill it in park. Here is one of his great invert threes.

Freecaster has some nice movies online, but you’ve probably seen them already. The event’s website is the place to look for the results and the press-releases if can’t remember or just lived under a rock this summer. Other articles you can google for, I bet ‘BMX Masters 2010′ as search query returns you some interesting results.

See you next year!

UPDATE – A whole lot more pictures went up on facebook today. See them here and here. Let the tagging begin!

Can you believe that? They literally had no clue where it was. I was stressing like crazy. Almost all of my savings had gone in to that gear and it would have sucked big time if it had gone missing. The guy on the phone convinced me, though, to just wait one more day. I could contact customer service again if I didn’t have it the next morning. I thanked the man and waited some more. When the next day around noon we still hadn’t seen a post man, I really grew tired of waiting and started calling every customer service number I could find. It took me a couple hours and I probably pissed a person or two off in the process, but I finally got hold of someone that could confirm to me that they had found my parcel laying somewhere in a corner and that they would send it to the nearest post office right away. I could pick it up there around noon.

Spiderman was competing in vert that year. Tailwhip in costume.

The next day, the day we were leaving for Cologne, we drove to the post office. We arrived there at about eleven o’clock and I asked the clerk if he could get me my parcel. He went to the back looking for it. He left for only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours. I just couldn’t wait to get that stuff in my hands. It’s of course at those moments, though, when you think it is finally over, that it obviously just gets a little worse. The man came back empty handed. It appeared the delivery truck was running late, so they hadn’t got anything in yet. I could barely hold myself from completely going crazy, but the poor man obviously couldn’t help it ether, so me and my mom had a seat and started waiting, again. After about half an hour of almost lethal boredom, the delivery came through and I was glad it was finally over.

About six hours later we were putting up the tent
and strapping on our protection gear to have our first ride on German soil.

The box was bigger then I had expected. But when I opened it on the back seat, I quickly found out why they used such a huge box. To assure safe transportation the shop had stuffed it from top to bottom with padding. When I finished unpacking, it looked like an air-padding bomb had exploded in the back of the car. There was foliage and little bags of air everywhere. In the middle of it all me and my shiny new toys. I was probably smiling like a little kid all the way home. By the time we arrived there 20 minutes later the car still was a complete mess, but all my gear was assembled. After the the batteries got charged, it would be ready to rip. The bitch here, though, was that because we had lost so much time in the post office, I only had about half an hour left to load up my luggage and my bike, lunch and get my ass over to my friends’ house whose parents would be driving us to Cologne. The charging of the batteries was going to have to wait until we were in Germany. What a shame, no pictures from the departure and the arrival. But hey in the end, I was already happy it could come along.

Mike Miller going crazy high over the box with a beautiful inverted three during PRO park qualifying.

About six hours later we were putting up the tent and strapping on our protection gear to have our first ride on German soil. The street course looked fantastic! After a few minutes Willem (Van Gansen) was already blasting out some cool tricks as were several other Belgians we had met up with at the camping site. Among them were Jimmy (Van Belle) and Anthony (Reynaert). I, who had only just started riding again after a two month break to recover from a broken leg and was waiting for the batteries of my camera to charge, had also ventured out onto the ants nest like street course and was cruising around, dodging crazy flairing and double tailwhipping sixteen year olds. It was pretty disturbed, but I was loving it. As opposed to last year, the sun was shining all weekend and there was this nice little breeze. As I was looking around this madness, heavily breathing because my physical condition was still worth crap, I couldn’t help thinking “Damn, it’s great to be back!”

I kindly requested the press department to give me an accreditation and they obliged.

The next day after a relatively good nights rest, we had a quick breakfast and went to the street course. Although it was only just past ten, there were already many riders out there. Being far from a morning person I decided to just lay low and wait for Willem and Hannes’ parents to arrive, who had taken my batteries and charger to their hotel to fill them up and would be bringing them along when they came to watch there son compete. I had already read a couple of pages of the manual and had read a ton of reviews before I bought it so I had a good idea how it worked and what custom functions I had to select, but the whole weekend still was one huge crash course, especially the first day. The number of off timed or simply completely missed pictures was enormous, but the feeling you get when you do nail a shot makes it all better.

The Netherlands crew was there too and it didn't go unnoticed.

On top of just being able to be there and experience it all, I also got in completely free of charge. I had been setting up a website to make this online magazine, called Viewfinder magazine. I was planning on an article about the BMX Masters to be one of my central pieces in the first issue. Because I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to enter with a big camera bag without an accreditation, I kindly requested the press department to give me one and they obliged. I had a blast shooting pictures and writing the article. It was actually completely finished, page layout and everything, but the magazine sadly never made launch. It would be dropping twice a year, once in October to cover my summer adventures and then an other one in April to cover my winter strolls. It sounded like a super cool thing to do and it was a nice excuse to mess around a bit in some new software like InDesign and Illustrator, software I had never used before. I completely didn’t now what I was doing, though, and as a result it took me ages to get things done, constantly skipping back an forth from project to internet tutorial to figure something out. Once the summer was over and school started again, I simply couldn’t find the time to work on it and after I flunked the deadline and still wasn’t close to finishing I decided to just call it a day. I learned a lot from the many hours spend on it, though, so I have absolutely no regrets at al.

Some of the pictures from these first few days with my ‘big’ camera, I still count as some of my best work. Every time I look at them I get sucked back in time and experience the moment all over again. It it is no doubt only like this for me, but I just love it when a picture can do that to me and I really like to share ‘em if they do. Maybe someone who was there too can see them and take a trip down memory lane as well. Be sure to tell me if you’re one of them. I would love to here your story!