I have been trying to get to Barcelona for several years now, however each time something came up and I ended up traveling to a different destination. Finally this spring we came to a consensus that Barcelona could not wait any longer and before we knew it 10 riders had bought their tickets. Groups of riders came from Ottawa, Sudbury and Vancouver and we all met at Centre Ramblas; a hostel right in the centre of Barcelona.

Riders included Marc Boudreau and Jeff Bedard from Vancouver, Kyle Lafleur and Joel ‘Ace’ Delongchamp from Sudbury as well as Rich Redmond, Chris Bryan,

myself and rookie tripgoers Nick Stupich, Jay Leroux and Crazy Steve. As you can imagine motivating and navigating a group of 10 grimey bmxers is no easy task, but here is a breakdown of some of the highlights from the trip.

Rich’s Spot Map… Everything is near a subway stop in Barcelona.

DAY 1-

Everyone showed up to the hostel to find Jeff and Marc asleep in the room, miscommunication resulted in them showing up one day earlier than us. The room was 45 degrees at least with absolutely no air flow. The one window the room had opened up to a tiny alleyway into which people had clearly taken shits out of their hostel windows. It was brutal.

After getting all of our bikes put together, we went for a quick rip around the neighborhood just to take things in. We found several spots completely by accident, including a really tight wallride and a super famous bank/hip spot which was much tougher to ride than one would assume from watching people ride it in videos.

Kyle Lafleur with an interesting fakie wallride.

We ended day 1 at the beach, drinking beers and celebrating the beginning of what would surely be an epic adventure. After the beach we found our way down to the club district where Jay Leroux charmed a nice italian girl who put us on the guest list at BLVD club and got us free drinks all week. Thanks Giulia!

This is how Boudreau slept the whole week. On the balcony.

Day 2-

Everyone stayed up way too late and partied way too hard on Day 1 only to wake up in Saudi Arabia. The room was easily 20 degrees hotter than it was outside. The one single fan they supplied us with did nothing. After much haggling and arguing with the girl at the front desk she brought us an “air conditioner” basically a fan that you put ice in… An appliance from the Flintstones essentially. Rich found this unacceptable (as did all of us) and instantly broke into “we flew across the world for this mode” and argued with the front desk until they gave us a new room.

The Oogling perch.

The new room had a balcony and a much better air flow system. This also made it possible for us to oogle girls from above all week.

After a short nap we all went out riding and found a really cool spot with coping ledges, tranny benches and some amazing grinder lines. Unfortunately we got rained out super hard, it rained and hailed for about an hour. The rain was harder than anything I have ever experienced, it literally turned the streets into rivers.

We returned to the spot once everything dried to shoot some photos and chill out.

Jay Leroux, manual to barspin with Rich in hot pursuit.

Ginger with a hangover toothpick grind.

After riding we went back to BLVD club and had some pretty epic adventures. And thanks to Boudreau’s incredible tolerance for alcohol, we had beer street vendors following us more or less all night.

Unfortunately Chris Bryan was subject to some shady business that night, walking home after the club alone, he was accosted by a tranny hooker and had his iphone pick pocketed.

Day 3 -

We all woke up hung over again, however Boudreau (the last to go to bed) decided it was too much work to clean off his bed so he just slept on the balcony (a trend that would continue for the rest of the week). This being the first good sleep any of us had gotten since arriving in Barcelona, we were all ready to go out and shred. The day before we had met a couple of brothers from San Francisco (One BMXer and one Skateboarder) and they told us about some spot that had a bunch of vert spines in a row and told us the subway stop they were near. We all packed up and headed out to check this spot out only to find that it was actually a skatepark, and a really crazy one at that (and not in a good way). We rode there for a few minutes before discovering that there were some amazing metal banks, ledges and wallrides across the street.

Jay icepicking a miniature concrete vert ramp.

Ace spent a good chunk of time trying a manual to gap to double peg from a bench onto  an above bar height ledge, he managed to clock several gnarly crashes before giving up. Kyle Lafleur shut the spot down with a wallride gap to barspin over a rail into the street.

Kyle wallride to hop barspin over the rail.

Once we were finished at that spot, we had grand plans to gradually work our way back to the hostel but didn’t get more than 100 yards before finding one of the most magnificent bank spots. Hips, sub boxes, manual ledges, gaps to grass, everything… literally in view of the last incredible spot we rode. The entire group felt doomed, and that we might never get back to the hostel… but nobody really cared. Jay quickly got to work with some hop whips from the sub box into the bank, Nick Stupich broke out his signature decade 180 footjams on the bank and Rich Redmond gave us a scare with an enormous 360 running man to grass explosion.

Jay hop whipping his way to OZ down the yellow brick road.

No frog legs on this one. Kyle Lafleur downwhip.

Boudreau was hurt, but he sessioned the fuck out of every soft grassy patch he could find.

Finding food in Barcelona that 10 guys can agree on is hard. We ate Donair and Shawarmas almost exclusively for the first half of the trip.

Once we finished with the amazing bank spot, we managed to make some distance and see a bit of the city. We rode a few spots here and there before we came to some pretty crazy brick bank hips… the same ones that Mike Aitken did a crazy gap across in the old Fit Barcelona video. Everyone threw down a few tricks for the camera on what turned out to be an amazing bank to bank hip both ways. We rode there for several hours, until 11pm or so when the store across the street stopped selling us beer.

Crazy Steve jumping over Jeff and Kyle

This trip was Ginger’s first time back on his bike riding hard since knee surgery, he did pretty well considering. Big Turndown.

There was also a super cool zip line swing in the park next to the banks, and after we had all given it a go, Ginger decided to try and attach his bike to it somehow… of course the guy in the knee brace is the guy to go for this…

It started off so positive…

Ginger got dragged a good 30 feet like this before he let go.

We made it to the beach eventually where we sat and drank beers while Jeff built a toilet paper hobo fire.

DAY 4 -

Our mission for the day was to hit the metro station and head north to the famous quarter to metal wall. Rich had mapped out all the spots using google street view prior to arriving but when we got to the metro station we were unable to find the it as easily as the spots we had found the day before. The crew became frustrated and almost mutinied on Rich (the trip’s unofficial captain) but at the last second we came over a hill and found the magical quarter to wall.

Me doing fastplants. One of my 4 tricks. This is actually a street spot… really.

Crazy Steve right up at the top of the wall.

This spot was my personal favourite of the trip. It was more interesting an obstacle than I have ever ridden in a skatepark. So many different lines and possibilities. And somehow it is a street spot… it is mind boggling.

Airing out over the top of the wall.

After riding there we searched around for a while and ran into an interesting stucco quarterpipe on the side of a highway onramp.

This was an odd find indeed. Kyle with a solid stucco toothpick.

The quarter was wavey and bumpy, not really good for much but Kyle had no problem toothpick stalling it.

Clearly by this day on the trip most of the guys had gone far too long without porn and were becoming crotchety towards each other. Bickering over which way to go, and what to do… until we stumbled upon (appropriately enough) a pair of spongey nipples in a playground…. The same ones that are prominently shown in some of the Nike 6.0 barcelona videos.

Rich stretching out a nice no footed can over the second nipple.

I suffered what has been dubbed ‘one of the best crashes ever caught on video’ while riding this spot. When you’re running up to this obstacle you have to weave between two small boulders and I somehow clipped my pedal coming through and scorpion grinded all the way up the takeoff. It really sucked. I was virtually unscathed but that was the end of my session. It didn’t slow Jay, Rich or Steve though. All of whom got some pretty decent clips on these nipple jumps.

And that night we drank Absinthe…

It seemed like such a good idea at the time…

One key quote from Ginger, while waiting in line at the club, he leans in to a red headed girl who is clearly with a guy and says “hey, do you want to make more?” (implying they could make creepy red headed babies together). At which point they began to flirt. I’m not sure exactly what was said, but when it was pointed out that he was trying to pick up a girl who has a boyfriend he just said “picking up a girl who’s with someone is just like cod fishing… you just gotta troll for a couple of hours”. Ruthless.

Day 5

Recovered from Absinthe drinking.

Day 6-

We started the day at Macba… a pretty famous ledge spot. Ace took another ruthless chest to handlebars crash first run to get everything going. We then went and rode a really interesting bank setup where Kyle Lafleur got real sweaty trying a bars to manual down the bank.

Jay Leroux – Maniac.

We eventually made our way to the Sea Wall where we met up with Crazy Steve who had been solo running it for a few hours already by the time we got there. The sea wall was a lot of fun, everyone carved the doors and then we started having a quarterpipe session on the shorter area. Rich was going super high and blasting perfect tables. Jay whipped it as was expected but some of the sand from the beach got into his usually well groomed vagina and kept him from going upside down and flairing it.

Jay did alot of whips.

What a haircut… I mean table.

After the sea wall we went and rode some night time street. The most notable happening was while riding a bank to subrail spot, Kyle was trying to 180 over the rail, turn around and half cab back into the bank over the rail… well some spanish dude was yelling at us from his 10th story window, we knew he wanted us to leave but apparently we didn’t know how BADLY he wanted us to leave. On Kyle’s last try, a large bottle came hurling from the sky and missed him by inches, smashing all over the bank. It would have been devastating if it had hit him. That put a pretty big damper on the session, half the crew headed home to the hostel and the other half of us pedaled around looking at spots but didn’t ride much.

Day 7-

On day 7 some of the guys went riding, but Ginger and I went and checked out the Sagrada Familia, an insane church in Barcelona. For any fans of architecture, this place is a must. Absolutely stunning. The lineup usually takes several hours, but we just cut in line about 50 feet from the front. We’re probably terrible people.

Everyone had different flights to catch the next morning, but most of us went out and partied more or less right until we had to go to the airport. Before the party started however we all got together to get our Caricature drawn (as seen at the top of this article). The artist did a great job. He really captured the essence of the group!

Rich, Nick and I closed the club down at 6am and hopped in a cab for our 9am flight. Rich fell asleep at the airport mcdonalds and we couldn’t wake him up… I think that means we partied properly the night before.

I’ve been on a few euro trips now, and I can say positively that spending a week in Barcelona with 10 awesome dudes was definitely one of the best times of my life. We rode hard, partied harder, ate way too many donairs and oogled more women than any of us can possibly remember. This was a classic BMX road trip.

There’s a point form write up and loads of photos from everyone’s Barcelona trip by Rich up on Embassy.

Ben Kaufmann always delivers a good time. Always.

It sort of looks like he’s bomb dropping out of a helicopter… but Moxley is actually doing a 360 here…

Moxley throwing down an extended superman tailwhip.

Max Vincent doing a decade over the box.

The bike was my first real ride. 1984 Haro Sport…I worked for 2 years as a bee keepers helper to buy this thing.

Cheers,
Roland

I don’t really get the reference on this one, but I definitely love the addition of Rich’s amish beard and Jeff’s hilarious 70s fatbody. Steve gave me a nice full head of hair too, which I definitely appreciate.

The next isn’t as family friendly…

This was submitted by friend of capital BMX Derek Frett. If I’m not mistaken, its based on one of his earliest childhood memories.

This one I actually found on his myspace page. true story.

Another from crazy steve… again not sure I get the reference, but still hilarious.

KEEP SENDING THEM GUYS! this is great stuff!!

270 bars

Big tuck no hands

270 turndown