England

Hello.

I came back from my UK trip yesterday. I went to the final round of the British Championship, which was also an so called European Cup which everyone from EBU countries could enter.

On Friday the 19th I and my dad arrived to London and got picked up at the airport by Stuart Matthews (Thanks Stuart) and went to his house where we stayed on Friday and Saturday night. During the day on Saturday I went in to London City centre to meet up with some friends from home who happened to be there on the same day, and in the evening I attended a dinner with trials people from a lot of European countries.

In the morning on Sunday 21st we. together with Andy Chai went to the venue at Hook Woods. It's a great place for a competition with loads of interesting obstacles such as rocks, logs, banks and concrete things. Throughout the day I rode fairly well, but did some silly mistakes and ended up on 5th place in Elite, which still isn't bad.

The day after the competition I went to Exeter to visit Joe Seddon and Juliane Treue. We went down to the seafront of south England and rode the cliffs, where these pictures were taken by Juliane:






On Tuesday we went to a cool spot pretty much in the middle of nowhere in Devon, where I took this picture with my phone:

and Juliane shot these photos from the same place:




On Wednesday I went to Bristol to ride with Rowan Johns, Sam Wheeler, Tic and a few more riders. It was a good day out, and I got to ride some of the now classic Bristol spots. In the evening I and Sam went to his house, where I stayed until Friday.

We rode Oxford on Thursday. It was a very relaxed ride, which was good as my back started hurting during the week. The only bad thing about Oxford is the amount of people and security guards, which stopped us from riding some of the spots.

Friday didn't really bring a lot of riding during the day, we went to a roughly built BMX-park inside an old factory building somewhere. It was cool going there, but I couldn't ride much on the trials bike. In the evening, however, I went back to London to stay at Chai's place near Hammersmith. The first thing we did when I got there around 10pm was to go out riding the streets around his. That turned out to be an awesome ride, loads of good spots, almost no people out to disturb us and perfect weather. I had a great ride and pulled off some really cool moves, which made the night ride even more perfect.

The morning after, on Saturday, I got on the underground to Oxford Street to meet another of my friends from home who rescently moved to London. We had a good day just walking around in the streets, looking in shops and going to different cafés and areas in the city. In a shop in Covent Garden I found the perfect birthday gift for my girlfriend too. This evening I had dinner with my friend in her apartment and later went out to a club.

Sunday was the last day of riding. This day there were a fair few riders out, of which I can name John Shrewsbury, Andy Chai, Sam Wheeler (still on BMX though), Nick Goddard, plus 10 or so other very friendly people.

I had an awesome week, thanks to everyone who made it possible by helping me out in all sorts of ways. When I got home I emptied my walled from all the train tickets I had left from the trip, which together cost me approximately 130 pounds. These are the ones I still had left: