The concept of the Local Exposure Tour is pretty straightforward, grab a bunch of middle-to-big name pro riders, put them in an RV and drive around some section of to country putting on demos/jam sessions with the locals. At the end of it all the best local gets taken out on the next tour to make a name for himself. It's one of those concepts that's so stupidly simple that it's just plain amazing that no one thought of it before Allan Cooke did. So, all hail Allan.
The deal was that the following riders would be at The Skatepark Formerly Known as X-Games: Allan Cooke, Chris Doyle, Ryan "Biz" Jordan, Mike Cleaveland, Ryan Guettler, Cory Martinez and Brandon Hoerres. Dave Mirra was busy being His Mirraness at a celebrity car race on the left coast and was going to take the red-eye in to make Sunday's demo. Since United is only a few minutes from Casa de Negro I decided to stop by. I did not, however, take a camera. From an observation standpoint, United sucks. It's got this raised observation area surrounded by a chain-link fence, the result of which is, more or less, an always obstucted view. I'm positive it makes the liability lawyers happy, tho.
Oh yeah, while the park isn't "bike hostile" it's definitely more "skate friendly." Works out great for me, 'cos I suck, but for other people there seemed to be a great lack of lines due to everything being a bit too small. The most popular hits seemed to be the 4' hip into the 6' quarter next to the mini ramp. The Pros, for the most part just put on a box-jump demo.
For my part I had a family emergency and ended up leaving after an hour. As far as demos go, it was ok, but it was more important for me to be home.
Bangers of the night:
There were some other randome things that I caught. Allan Cooke was all about trying to pull these weird manual and nose manual lines. There's this little "shaggy headed kid" who The Mrs. totally wants to adopt who was pulling 360s. A year ago this kid could barely 180, his dad told me that he's pulling no footed can-cans "over everything." Whenever pros are around someone has to flip in front of the "No Flips" sign. Go pros