One of the many benefits of being from a small country is that it doesn’t take a long time before you are in another country. Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and even Denmark are all relatively short drives away. But even though countries like Germany are close, crossing the border makes everything look and feel slightly different. From the colour and build of the houses up to the food, everything is similar but not the same. Me being from The Netherlands but residing in Germany noticed these things when I first came here. But as time goes by, we start to accept our surroundings as they are and stop seeing things we were fascinated by a year before. So it was great to see this video pop up and notice the excitement Wouter, Pascal, Robbin and the rest of the Skatestore team must have felt at times.

Intro Roland Hoogwater.
Text Wouter Molenaar.
Photos Thomas Wieringa.
Video Marc Bolhuis.

During this Skatestore tour through Germany, we drove around, skated lots of spots, travelled to new places and drank lots of beer… A trip like this sounds like an ideal skateboard vacation doesn’t it? It was my first trip with this group of people, and we travelled to the German “Ruhr Area”, which was a pretty new place for us all. The Ruhrpott consists of a couple of old industrial cities like Dortmund, Essen and Köln. We had some excellent spot guides in the friendly folks of the Obtain Company, and they served up one spot after another. During the trip, all eleven of us stayed together bunched up in an Air BnB located in Bochum (one of Nordhrein-Westfalen biggest cities). Even though things where tight we ended up giving Sebastiaan Vijverberg his very own room because he snored too loud and we needed our beauty sleep.

We started most of our days quite early and chose a daily diet consisting of iced coffee, beer and pizza. Because of the proximity to one another, we picked a new city to skate every day, and to our surprise, we got to skate many well-variated spots in all of the cities.

As far as the skating goes, I remember some pretty crazy tricks going down pretty fast! For instance, Wouter de Jong jumped on this kinked rail that no one else wanted to touch and Shajen 360-flipped a rather large set first try. Every day we all tried our best to stack some clips. Another great thing was that we didn’t stress, sometimes we stayed at a spot for hours just because we could, other times we got kicked out tremendously fast. Either way, fun was being had the whole time. To answer my first, only and most important question; Yes, it was the ideal skateboard vacation.