Mac ‘N Cheese On Your Hot Dog from Comet Skateboards on Vimeo .

Thanksgiving is about getting together with family and friends, sharing stories and feasting. What better time to share with your skate buddies, riding the gnarliest roads on the east coast? After our respective family obligations, fellow Comet rider Keith “The Caveman” Rebhorn, Earthwing rider Pat Schep and all around ripper Michael Rubin came to my house in Virginia for a thanksgiving skatecation fueled by left over turkey and stoke.

After waking up earlier than we do for classes or work we headed out to skate some of my favorite runs. It was cold, windy and the pact I’d made with myself to only wear shorts seemed like a bad idea as we got coffee and breakfast at Sheetz. The first run we hit is called the breastworks. At the top of the mountain is a Confederate fortification from the civil war. There’s a beautiful overlook and historical trail as well as a sick right hairpin, doublewide lanes and never ending banked sweepers with a left hairpin to end out the two miles of twists. It’s the perfect run to get close and have a party with your friends on the way down.

After a few hours of skating, mixing it up and narrowly escaping many run ins with cars, even an 18 wheeler, we moved on to a big mountain pass reminiscent of Colorado we call Moredoor. It’s four and a half miles of 9% grade with some of the most massive left hairpins and gnarly never-ending right hand turns I’ve ever seen on a road. Going into these turns at 50mph with trucks and traffic going up the other lane, guard rails and cliffs that drop to the valley below leaves little room for error. The first two hard rights have a big shoulder that’s paved right up to the rock face that are super fun to surf up and under. Our legs were already fried from skating the breastworks and the sun was going down so we only got a few runs in before heading back to make some dinner and hang out but vowing to go back first thing in the morning.

Since we’re poor skaters our meal was mac and cheese, hot dogs and cheap beer, the combination of which gave way to the title of the video. After recapping the day by watching all the footage we recorded, we popped in the horrible classic Thrashin’. If you haven’t seen this movie and skate you’re missing out on one of the best/worst creations of the 80s. The skating is inspiring, the sex scene awkwardly long and the plot and acting lacking anything worthy of mention. The night ended in the early morning, like most skate trips, giving us only a few hours of sleep before going back out to shred.

The second day started groggily with the hour and a half drive back to moredoor. We got through a couple of driving rotations and as the morning turned into afternoon made our way to another run that’s only a mile but gets up to 60mph for the last section. It was weird because this run used to seem really scary because of how fast you hit the sweepers towards the latter half of the hill but after four miles of super gnarly turns at the same speed if not faster it was kind of a bore. We only got in a few runs before Pat and Keith had to start their drive back up to Hoboken, NJ for classes the next day. All in all this was one of my favorite skate weekends ever. Sharing good roads, good vibes, and having good friends over is what makes day-to-day life worth living.

and here’s links to the mac n cheese video as well as a raw run on the breastworks: http://vimeo.com/8300138 http://vimeo.com/7911455

This entry posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.