We managed to find a day to grab lunch with the father of BMX Freestyle: Bob Haro. After some computer work in the morning we cruised over to Cardiff by the Sea to see Bob. It still feels surreal to be able to do this. For Bob to actually know me and my son Philip is crazy. For us to be able to sit down with Bob to hear about his ongoing projects is out of this world. The respect for the man is huge and will forever be there. For him to call me a friend is nuts. Thanks for your time Bob as we know it's precious.
Driving in California ain't too bad when you can avoid the bad hours of the day. We know we could have visited more friends that day but the drive and busy schedule of the past days and the full days
And..... it's Monday. Breakfast at DayDream in Costa Mesa with Mike de Wit. The week could have started a lot worse. Nice food place within a surf shop. Cali style. It was great to catch up with Choq and it was good to hear about the good news. Congrats. Mondays in LA. Not the busiest so all good. We hit the shops we wanted to visit. Some of them were closed so we had to come back for those but we started off at the new adidas flagship store at Melrose across the street from Cherry Los Angeles. For some reason Monday was a bank holiday which provided free parking. When you hop in and out stores it was nice not having to worry about parking meters that don't work and getting a ticket. We were in and out at Bathing Ape and discovered that the Palace store was closed. Next up: Supreme. We checked the same store a year ago so not much had changed. That goes for several of the stores we re-visited. We stopped by Kith and were still amazed by the curved handrail outside the store that has been hit on a skateboard. What was also amazing was that the Kith ice cream menu had "The Sylvester" flavour on it. Indeed, Nigel Sylvester has his own ice cream flavour at Kith, and it tasted good (had to try it). We took some photos of graffiti for future background use on Instagram. Might as well collect it while you're there. GOLF was checked, HUF was gone, Beyond The Streets was in between shows, Arc'terex has nice stuff and we strolled through the Carhartt store on La Brea. Next stop: In 'n Out Burger. We found one a bit North of LA. It was packed and a bit shady but the burger tasted good.
8am breakfast meeting at Eat Chow with BMX Sales guru Pete Garski. We always try to get together for a coffee, lunch, dinner or a breakfast. Pete used to do International sales for GT Bicycles and then moved on to Haro Bikes where he recently lost his position and is now in the hunt for something new. Whoever scoops him up is lucky. The plan was for our posse to go ride YT mountain bikes in San Clemente on Wednesday but because of the recent rain these kinds of activities are put on hold for a week or so. One of the crew members would be Dutchman Fred van Schie who runs the etnies BMX program. Fred was in the office on Tuesday morning and showed the new BMX/MTB shoes that are about to hit the market including some DIG magazine shoes, T's and hats. Stay tuned for that drop.
After doing a BMX 'zine for ten years (1987 - 1996) FATBMX made it on the internet. The year was 1998. Here to stay.