Well I made it safely back in Seattle in time to hop on a train back home to Vancouver, WA. Just had a relaxing Christmas at home and looking forward to kicking it back and catching up on things. I hope everyone gets to enjoy something similiar, happy holidays guys!

So I ended up at a hostel above a pub in Waterloo waiting for the other 3 guys I know who are coming from the US for Rendezvous (2 from Washington!), people just didn’t have enough space or time to host it seems. Oh well, this is actually an excellent hostel/pub.

Today I went climbing with Kiell and to an outdoor beginner class with Stephane and Thomas. Both were quite hard but not killers, they actually helped me get rid of the last of the painful soreness that made me dread tube stairs so much. The climbing was at a sweet place in Mile End set up mainly for bouldering featuring a room entirely covered in holds – properly called the monkey house The outdoor class started at 7pm and was very very cold… 15 minutes straight of quadrupedie to start the warmup just about froze my hands off!

Training tomorrow starts early tomorrow so I’m going to grab some sleep. Things are definitely looking up and Rendezvous is going to be fantastic!

Again the latest is in my Twitter but here’s a summary for you all:

Landed in London, explored around Waterloo, found a cool spot, twisted my ankle :/ Boo. Took a day to rest with Dan and conditioned Saturday with some PK Gen guys, Thomas proceeded to destroy my legs. Although it hurt to crouch and walk down stairs Sunday found me in Waterloo and Vauxhall again for the Off the Wall jam for some lighter training and meeting a bunch of cool people.

Today finds me with no idea of where I’m staying the next few days and an itch to go explore the great training areas I know are nearby. Too bad it still hurts to move Got lots of photos but no time to upload atm.

If you are in the UK and got some floor space for me or are up for some training, let me know! Cheers.

I’m leaving tomorrow for probably the biggest Parkour trip I’ve been on yet (or at least the biggest to a single location) and I just know I’m going to get some amazing training in. The problem is the crazyness from SF followed me here and my plans are all up in the air again.

So who’s in the UK and wants to train / can give me some space to crash?

Man this trip has been weird so far, I’m loving it! If you haven’t been keeping up with my Twitter (looking to get that more integrated into the site), here’s the rundown:

The Berkeley campus is fantastic for Parkour, access ramps everywhere! In fact the whole San Francisco Bay Area is incredibly ADA compliant I got some great photos at Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz for my new art series.

Unicycle basketball looks incredibly hard to do, and it’s also very hard to take photos of…especially at night.

I made a quick visit to the parkour witch doctor, and then immediately undid all of his work at a gym made of trampolines!

We got free reign of climbing stuff at Youtube Live which was a lot of fun and I met a bunch of random ‘celebrities’ who were uh…interesting. MC Hammer’s after party was almost as fun as Taurus was with all the crazy people there.

Then Dan Edwardes brought the wonderfully difficult PK Gen warmup style to the session today at some old military barracks. I was doing pretty well until he layed down a new wall routine that destroyed me, the folks back home will appreciate it Did a bit of exploration, took more photos of railing porn, turned a possibly horrible bail into no problem, and found some great lines before training was cut short to get lost on the buses for Dan to get to the airport.

Randomly checked out the excellent hip-hop dancefest, got some inspiration from the Human Creature group, and got back to Brian’s to write this post. San Jose next, than Monterey. Pictures…later.

So I got into San Francisco last night and crashed at NoSole’s place. Today we went to UC Santa Cruz for SFparkour’s monthly jam and it was amazing. The campus is like a giant REI combined with freeway park and handicap ramps Led a fun warmup for the guys, took some great pictures, and trained until I couldn’t jump no more.

This trip is rather off the cuff, I’m bouncing around between a few traceur’s couches and am getting a bunch of exploring done while people work at those things called jobs. Send me a twitter message or email if you are in the area and want to train!

If you missed my wonderfully short Twitter updates while I was overseas, it was rather hot, took a hell of a long time to get there, was 4 days straight of hard performances and workshops, and was one of the coolest experiences of my life. The natives were very nice, the food is excellent, and the culture/history is incredible.

We didn’t have any issues while there except maybe for Mark taking too many photos of the army guys with the big guns… But really we felt rather safe after the first day of craziness passed, and we’re definitely hoping to go back. Even met a nice local traceur who joined us in the show!

I’m on a crazy sleep schedule right because of the ten hour lag and built up quite the number of unread emails while over there but I’ll try to get the photos processed and uploaded as soon as I can, there’s a lot of media for this one with all of us combined…

If you missed the announcement on the PNWPA blog or APK, I’m heading to Beirut, Lebanon with the Tribe next week on behalf of the US Embassy to teach kids parkour!

That’s going to be absolutely amazing but I thought I’d also let everyone know I’m also planning trips to San Jose to visit the parkour witch doctor and friends as well as the big trip to London for Rendezvous 3! San Jose will probably be mid to late November, and London will be Dec 3rd to the 22nd. If you’re around let me know and we’ll train!

Follow my trips in Dopplr! Apparently I have the same average velocity as a duck right now…

I feel bad for not bringing my camera along on Saturday, I had no idea how beautiful Chicago is. Wandering around downtown with 70 traceurs next to the river surrounded by huge skyscrapers is quite the experience. Not that many amazing spots downtown that I could see, but the college campus we were at beforehand (UIC) was fricken awesome and we only saw a small portion of it.

Yesterday wasn’t particularly hard, but I just wasn’t feeling the energy for today at all and am looking forward to finally coming home tomorrow. We attempted to some parkour this morning before heading to the beach, but it ended up torrentially raining on us when we got there and we found ourselves surrounded and blocked out from the outside by the gay pride parade. After taking more than an hour to get the few miles back home, we just went and watched WALL-E Which is an awesome movie! Since I’m sitting next to Zac whose working on a writeup as well I’ll just leave it at that…

It was then when a miracle was performed – the likes of which have never been seen at a Parkour event since the beginning of time. Not only did (almost) everyone get in bed before Midnight, but everyone was up by 6:30, and ready to go by 7:30. That’s right. 7:30. In the morning. AM. Ante Meridiem. Janine and Zac got up a bit early to make about sixty banana filled pancakes to serve to people as they woke up, and then the whole group of 25+ people got out the door and to the train station earlier than scheduled. Everyone split into two at the World Trade subway station, with one group of traceurs navigating their way through Central Park, and another exploring Roosevelt Island.

Zac’s writeup of PKNY is up on APK, his video and my thoughts after the gap.

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