Women of Freestyle Jam August 2nd, 2003
by Alyssa Shoemaker
Six or Seven people were supposed to go along. But it ended up being just Jon and I... because of over protective parents, lack of money, and not calling off work. They missed out. I woke up Wednesday morning, July 30th, to get my braces taken off. Shortly after, we left for Section 8 in Ohio. When we arrived someone was standing nearby and informed us that Section 8 was destroyed three days ago from flooding. Rumor has it that it will require 100 grand to repair. RIP Section 8. We were driving all day and didn't get anywhere, so we decided to check out Chenga before it closed. Three hours later upon arriving in Cleveland, we found out that Chenga is closed every Wednesday. We had been getting lost all day due to bad directions and road markings. By that time, Jon was getting bitchy. Bad start to what we were expecting to be a great trip. Exasperated, we got a nice hotel and relaxed.
The Second Beginning
Explored the woods, ate at Subway, and did some shopping in a thrift shop in an attempt to whittle away time for Chenga's daily opening at 4 PM. When we first got there, we had the place to ourselves and flew everywhere. After half an hour, the people started slowly coming in. As I was waiting on a small roll in for the ledge, I saw some Japanese girls, an emo girl, and a really skinny girl start sauntering around the park. Well, within a minute I got closer and found out that the skinny girl was Kim that runs WOF (we already know each other well), the emo girl was a beginner from Ohio named Christine, and then the names of the Japanese girls. One could speak english very well, her name is Saori and I've known about her for a long while. The other two were struggling with English but both were surprising as far as riding goes... one was named Sumiko and I remembered her new profile on the site, but the other I've never seen or heard of. All the Japanese girls had a good amount of skills.
While I was still working on the ledge, I saw two very familiar figures walk in... my old buddies Nina Buitrago and Stacey Mulligan. They were just joining at that moment as well (Kim, Sam Lyons, Kari Olandese, Anita Hodgin, the japanese girls, and a bunch of guys had been on a roadtrip the whole prior week). They flipped over when they saw me, and we were so excited to be riding together again. We haven't rode together since a whole year ago. We're the perfect trio, we all just get crazy and kick ass when we're together. Shortly after that reunion, Sam Lyons from Seattle walked in (she is very crazy), Anita started riding around (I had no idea who she was until someone told me), and Kari popped out of nowhere with a video camera (and we had the whole same "reunion reactions" as with Nina and Stacey because Kari and I hung out at Woodward the entire week I was there and we're both into philosophy and nutrition). This is when the night started getting crazy. Saori landed her first sub box in the bowl, Stacey was going for huge sub boxes, Nina was icepicking this bank to ledge, I called out on Kari to 360 the box (and she eventually landed it too!) and so on so on. Sam was doing 180's to half cabs on flat. Nina and I rode the wallride as Sam took pics, I flew around that fun curved wallride a lot (it was very easy), and then Nina, Stacey, Kari and I all went in trains through the rhythms and that was probably my fondest memory. I always wanted to do a train with girl riders. Everyone loved Chenga, and I'm still convinced that Chenga should have been the skatepark that the WOF Jam was held at since it's large, it has things for everyone, and there's a HUGE flatland area. But that was one of the best sessions the whole trip. Outside after it closed, crazy antics started when someone brought out a tazer. Anita got a hold of it and "became one of the guys" when she started doing it to herself and then attacking Sam with it. We decided (about 40 of us) to go to some guy's house named Jake in order to ride his spine mini. Two minutes after we got there, the lights turned off because he had made a deal with his neighbors to have the lights off and stop riding at 11. People stood around for a long time and we finally decided to find a hotel. We got two tiny motel rooms with 6 people in each by 2:30. I got no sleep that night because I was sleeping beside this dude that snored really loud. By this time, I had met Ben's recent purchase... a dildo named Dilbert. That dildo went everywhere and created half of the adventures we were in. More on that later. It went flying through Chenga, through parking lots, got pierced, was stuck in some dude's bare ass cheeks for a photo, and got a soap bath in the motel's sink.
Welcome to Indiana
I woke up at 8:30 AM, and woke up Kim. We both took showers and woke up some people to go to the free breakfast. After eating, we came back and told everyone that we were leaving for Indiana in ten minutes. Ten vehicles flew down I 69. It rained a lot and Jon and I had a lot of soaked luggage (since he has a pickup with no top). At one point it got so bad that we all pulled over. The storm was right above us with high winds and even hail for a couple of minutes. After stopping and wasting tons of time at about 5 places, we finally made to Indianapolis with time to spare. One stop included a little too much mishap with Dilbert. Andrew had it stuffed partially down his pants and the top part hidden by his shirt... where he was holding it. Apparently, he gave a weird look at one of the cashiers as he walked out, and not a moment later did a lady fly out in search of that kid, sure that he had stolen something. It was amusing to see the relief on her face once we got it through to her that he had a sex toy down his pants.
> > >
