Tour de campus!

Last weekend Psycho, Lindy Liu-Who and I went for a bit of a skate around campus. The weather was surprisingly good, what after that stupid random snowstorm that hit and everything.

Note leftover bits of snow. There were puddles we had to
skate around as well so we wouldn't get wet bearings.

I have to say that it took a while for me to get used to outdoor skating. I never did it all that much, and paths that you walk on normally suddenly are bumpier and steeper for some reason when there are wheels on your feet. So a lot of the paths we had planned out had been tested when we were walking around on campus, but skating was totally different and we did ask what we were thinking when we came across things that we had originally thought were nice surfaces to skate on, but turned out to be all seizure-inducing from bumpiness.

Architecture roof: bumpy as fuck.

For safety reasons, I get really nervous about lips or cracks in sidewalks where you can catch your wheels and stack. I did that once or twice; once I just bellyflopped onto the ground and it hurt. Ow. :P (I also have a fear of looking like a douche in public, and that involves also noticeably falling on my face in front of a bunch of people. Luckily that did not happen in the bellyflop case.)

But we skated a bunch around the drillfield, through some quads, and down a random ramp joining two buildings several stories above street level. It got better after we had skated a while.

The ramp was long.

We also saw this sign but you could only
read it if you were close enough (and
therefore already breaking the rules).

I wasn't prepared for the fact that there were so many people on campus on the weekend. Okay, normally I'm not bad with obstacle avoidance. We didn't hit anyone, but there were people with kids and people riding their bikes and people with dogs and it was like WTF.

Also there were some very rude guys on bikes who didn't even stop when we were coming (downhill) towards them; they just looked at us and kept riding their bikes up, while we were trying not to run into them and/or get out of their way. I almost had to bail on the grass, and Lindy had to grab a thorn bush (WTF) to stop from runinng into them. Grrr. I think Psycho had a few words for them after they passed us.

And then we saw these people doing parkour! There were a LOT of them; it was like there was a litle Parkour-land or something in this one quad on campus. And none of them were wearing helmets. I have to say that I get kind of (read: really) uncomfortable when I see people flinging themselves at buildings and not wearing any protective gear at all.

Okay, maybe THIS makes me more uncomfortable: PARKOUR ON SKATES:

When we were done we went and got burritos and jewelery. It was a good day.

Anyway, if the weather keeps up there'll be more outdoor skating, and then I can get over my stupid fear of hills and public stacking. Yay!