A break in the cold weather brought everyone out to skate! With the past many days of rain, snow and freezing cold days and nights, no one has gotten much skate time in at the park. This day, the temps got up to about 61 during the day and didn't drop much at night. Earlier in the day, I had read forum posts from Russ calling for a session tonight. Later on, I got a call from Shawn Coffman as well. From the sound of it, you woulda thought all of Atlanta was coming to skate! haha I was not gonna miss this one! I got there around 6:30 and who's the first person I run in to? None other than Don Hillsman! We caught up for a minute. He said he remembered my face right off but it had been a while. I told him I was one of the crew from Birmingham that use to come over to the ATL parks. After that, first thing he said was "How's Rob doing, man!?!" I couldn't figure out who he was talking about. It didn't hit me until later that night at my hotel room that he was asking about Rob Smith....man, even Don remembered Rob! Anyways, turns out he lives in Clearwater, FL now but was up to visit. What started as a 3 day trip had become a 3 week stay so far, as he said. He is trying to get a new business going and will be jumping between Atlanta and there. We talked a bit about the old days and such, but got back to the subject at hand...skating tonight! As I padded up and warmed up, I got to see Don skate again. I hadn't seen him skating since the old old days at the skate park in Lithonia and maybe later at Skatezone. However, Don didn't seem like he had slowed up at all....in fact, I think he's gotten better! He was blasting HUGE airs, dropping in to frontside lipslides, big grinds, tweaked inverts, and coming super close to ollie blunts in the deep end! He even did ollie to fakies, which after he landed, he told me he hadn't done those in about 5 yrs because the last time he got hurt really REALLY bad on one...he was stoked! Along with Don, many of the usual suspects were out for the big session....Russ Millis, Woody Trend, Jeff, Steve O, Humphries, Cuban Al, and Shawn Coffman. With Don there, evreyone was stoked and stepping up their runs. It was a GREAT night!
Hillsman coming DOWN from an air!
Hillsmans first ollie-to-fakie in 5 years!