Geri's Bowl! Traveling and building skateparks, you always meet new people, make new friends. This bowl in Austria was an opportunity to go back to the land where two years previously I had worked on the Cradle Skatepark. Yes indeed, it took two years for another European project for myself. Worth the wait, this was a nice way to go back to and meet up with my new-found friends. A backyard bowl is probably the best way to get the biggest bang for your buck and this is why you are starting to see more of these bowls popping up in various backyards around the globe. This one has an added feature that was installed in the following summer and that is water. It is plumbed and is ready for those mid-summer cool downs.Some may say it is one of the first in Europe, "an American style pool," I don't know. The most important thing is it fun and a homegrown effort. Hopefully there will be more people catching on to this wave. We skaters generally can live without the swimming, but it sure makes it a lot easier to get past the red-tape of building one of these special bowls. For a video clip of the bowl being skated click here Quicktime (678 KB) "Real bowl trolls build their own terrain. Childress somewhere in Austria" Thrasher Magazine, August 2004 |