Hey All, This is Shawn from Summerland now living in Portland Oregon. Aaron hooked me up with a log in so I could write some of my thoughts on bike riding on here.
I figured I would start off with a post about what bike riding was like for me in the late 90′s.
I started riding a bike with Josh Dool, we rode mostly in Summerland, and would sometimes take a trip to the OG Penticton park, and street. There was a pretty significant day in my bmx life when we where driving to the Pen park and rolled past Travis on his K2. I had just bought a Norco RPM, and Josh had a Specialized TJ Laven Fat Boy. 3 main things happened over the next few weeks that stand out.
First: Travis showed us how to drop into the bowl and do fly outs. This was a super fun time, I remember Travis doing 540′s and I learned no footers. We all just rode as fast as we could in order to go as high as possible. I don’t think I would ever even think about going that fast into a bowl again, full speed carve in sounds like a busted face to me.
Following the fly outs, came breaking nearly every part on those bikes. I remember Travis had parts that had a warranty like Profile Hubs, and he also had a sponsorship through K2 and got free stuff. Josh had bought a new bike, and broke the frame 3 times in 6 weeks. Needless to say bikes have come along way. Or people just dont do enough fly outs anymore. I mostly had to live off of parts past down to me from Jay Fletcher and Travis.
The last main thing I remember about those days was Road Fools 5. This was the first legit bike video I had seen, Josh had some old props video that we used to watch, but could only watch one half since his mom had accidently recorded Opera on the second half. I borrowed Road Fools 5 from Travis and Recorded it. I watched that video multiple times every day for at least 2 years. The video wore out in many places and eventually stopped working all together. I later bought the DVD at Virgin Records in Vancouver. I guess they sold the rights or something and made some real money off it.
Anyways, Thats where I was at in the late 90′s came into the game late, but had some real fun.
