It's 3 PM on the 13th of July and I'm sweating my balls off. Wondering why I didn't leave earlier the asphalt is melting under my feet. I'm standing on the nearest highway to my house waiting for the first random car that is willing to pick up a kid with a huge bag with wheels under it. Destination: Les Deux Alpes on the French side of the Alps. But first I have to make sure I'm getting out of this country where the horizon doesnt's show as much as a little raisin in height difference. It takes me about an hour and a half till some weird business dude picks me up in his station car that probably just carries his loving wife and kids most of the time. I could care less as long as he takes me further away from home. Or maybe I should say closer to my destination. Glass half empty half full shit. I guess mine's about 1 percent full when I take place in his airconditioned vehicle.

Perhaps it helps if I explain why I'm setting off on this journey in this particular way. Well, I don't really have a lot of money besides the dough I just got from selling some old gear and working in people's backyards. It's not that I'm lazy and jobless, it's just that I spend it all without knowing where it goes. Then summer comes around and most of my buddies leave to go shred the glacier and I'm stuck at home contemplating why I'm not with them. All of a sudden one of those little light-bulbs popped up right next to my head. It was clear to me then that I didn't need money to make the 1100 kilometre trek south. I decided hitchhiking was probably the cheapest way so that's how I ended up sitting in this posh car. Thanks brain! (sorry thinkthank but it was just so convenient here)

I get dropped off right after we cross the Belgian border. After about 5 minutes some lady stops and asks me where to. Then she notices my big wheelie that's carrying my gear and clothes for an undetermined period of time. She probably has the space for a little beauty case so she spurs off again in her economic mini-euro car. Two hours later two guys in a beatup car offer me a ride. They bring me to the nearest city and from there it doesn't take too long before I get carried further by arguably the funniest Belgian guy walking around. He drives a white van that has 'Spekslager' written on the side of it. Loosely translated that means the man does business in meat. We swerve around for a couple hours and when the night's well underway I'm left on the outskirts of the city where the EU holds down it's fort. Brussels. I walk around for a while feeling pretty lost untill a middle-aged man offers me a ride to the train station. That was probably the stupidest thing I could do, because from there on it seemed pretty impossible to hitch myself further.

My lightbulb starts flickering so I decide not to torture myself much longer and spent the warm summernight sort of sleeping at the central station. The next morning I stumble and decide it's gonna be the train from here on. Another 900 kilometres going through so much hassle was gonna get me on snow when all the white stuff would be gone. I buy this Eurail pass that let's me travel by train unlimited for two weeks. Cheaper than a one way so I saved myself a little money there. 13 hours and 5 different trains later I'm at the foot of the Alps. Grenoble. Beautiful city, but expensive places to sleep so I crash on a patch of grass. Luckily there's two more backpacking girls hanging around so we look out for one another. I got the morning shift so they wake me at 5 AM just in time to catch a beautiful sunrise. Ahhh, things are turning out for the better. By 7.30 I'm on the bus letting green grass hills glide past me on the way to my resting place for the upcoming two weeks.

The moment I get off the bus everything falls in place. I smell fresh air for the first time in it seemed way too long ago. A second later I see a bunch of my best friends decked out in their gear walking right towards me (actually the bakery behind me but that's another stoy). They're amazed I made it and let me crash in their humble appartment. There's already 8 people there while it's only made for 6, but of course they can fit one more. There's a whole colony of Dutch kids there in summertime so needless to say those two weeks were engraved into my mind for eternity.
Foreigh alcoholic beverages, slushy rails, getting radical in the pool, extreme golfing, mushy kebabs, buttering little jumps, hiking the falls, touching sky on the hip, croissants in the chillzone, cardhouse domino, international shittalking, baguette liftrides, spanish girls, home away from home-made food, well, the list can go on and on. You all know what it's like. Sharing amazing stuff with like-minded people in a beautiful place. Yeah, I'm turning into a hopeless romantic again.

I guess I could tell you some more stories about how me and my friend who throws insane stuff on rails sessioned one minibox for a whole afternoon and were the last ones leaving the glacier. Or how my friends' cellphones got stolen out of the appartment by the owner and some big dudes so I had to spent a mere 4 hours translating stuff at the police station cause the frenchies simply refuse speaking english and I was the only person my friends knew who speaks french. You see, I'm doing the long sentence thing so I'll keep it short.
My friends all went back the same way they came, while I had a long trip ahead of me already digging myself well into debt cause everything turned out to be a little more expensive than I thought. Now in case you've ever heard about those high-speed trains, that's not my style (although it would've been nice). My cheapass pass however would only allow me on the twenty-stop, easy going, but see more, old-bounce train. It took me another two days to get home and a sketchy overnighter in Paris, but hey, at least I didn't get any inappropriate offers by dirty old-men looking for the right thing in the wrong places.

Allright, so most of you have probably heard of this weird fridge thing that goes on in Japan and the UK. People cramming up in massive lines to ride a 600-foot slope. Luckily summertime puts ordinary people in a less snowfocused mindstate so we can take over and reign indoors.

Oh, I forgot to tell you I'm not from either one of the aforementioned countries. Actually I'm from Holland, you know, that place with tulips, the grass and of course those skin-showing ladies with little to reveal in the redlight district. Sweet old Amsterdam. Or maybe not. It's kinda sad to see how little people know about other countries untill they've been there in person. I guess it's not something you can blame people for thinking, cause it's not like we all have rich parents or find inventive ways to discover something a little more out of our own, familiar ways. Yeah, I guess this is supposed to be about some thing where you glide down some snowcovered soil standing sideways. Or in my case an old garbagepile with a big fridge built on top of it. So I'll stick to that for now.

I may let it sound like it's a crappy thing that we ride indoors, but to be honest, everytime I go there I'm as happy as a little kid getting one out of the cookiejar. I mean, it's pretty amazing that we can ride 365 days a year don't you think? It might only be a tiny slope where you spend maybe 10 percent riding and the rest with a steel pole between your legs, but as long as it puts a smile across our faces I'm not complaining (that sounded pretty gay, but I think you get my point).

I help this skate/snowboardshop called Forties (cause they like those bumstyle bottles of gold they got in the States so much) organising a night every second sunday where we place our rails and boxes. We also install a nice soundsystem, get the beats and our beatup leather chillcouches rolling and let our local scene do the magic. So basically we have this local slope we shred to pieces on a weekly basis. It's an hour away from my house but it's the closest one. (oh yeah an hour doesn't seem like a big deal for all of you americans but in our flat pancakecountry you're halfway through driving for an hour). Now we had some stuff made that people got excited about, but since them corporate schmucks running that joint aren't willing to invest anything in not one of our ideas we gave up hope and just run with the ropes we got. Bunch of conservative, anti-freshness haters caring mainly 'bout the euro sign in their eyes. It frustrates me cause if this place had different people on the wheel we'd turn that place into a kingdom.

Enough bitchin' so let's get down to the point why I started typing this story in the first place.
Besides our dome there's a lot more of these indoorshredfacilities that me and my friends sometimes undertake trips to. Our place is probably one of the weaker ones but probably has the best vibe. All the other fridges have better rails so every now and then we bring our spirits over to the highroller parks.

The one we went to on this special occasion is called Ice-Mountain and had been on the top of my must-visit list for quite some time now. It is to be found in a different country, namely Belgium. The waffle and beercountry for you all of you stereotype lovers. Another thing, not every kid here (kid: 16-24 years of age, me being one since I'm 20) owns a car so it's crucial that we can borrow someone's parents car. And since they're discouraging people driving cars here everyone rides a small unit with the best gasmileage cause the petrol is damn expensive. You see where I'm getting at? Putting five guys and shredsticks into one of them little thingies is quite the challenge. We arrived after three painful hours and the first thing we noticed was that this one was actually built on poles so it looked pretty massive. Excited as housemomma preppin' herself for the 'Bold and the Ugly' we changed clothes in the lot and quickly ran inside. After the necessary payments we made our way inside where the snow was cracking under our boots. Coming from a 30 degree summer day it's always quite the shock when it's a shivering -5 degrees all of sudden (100 to 30 degrees in Fahrenheit or something like that). I'll sign for the cold though especially considering we now found ourselves in the surroundings of a handful of boxes, rails and jumps that were all shaped perfectly. Hot damn!

Strap in and let's shralp this place apart. On my first towroperide up I already saw some local kids killing it so that made me even more stoked.
Although I don't like comparing let me tell you this. When you're used to some improvised setups with mobile hits in front of them riding a fully shaped park is quite the pleasure. Although I'm not a freak I must admit I got a little aroused by the sighting of all this gewy goodness.

At the top you had a nice mellow roller for buttering and a downbox on the side. After that was a little jump, then a big jump or a big, skinny flatbar that was setup pretty sketchy, then you could still do a low, but fairly long flatbox followed by your boxflavor of choice. A stepdown, a flatdown or a c-box all setup perfectly. Oh yeah, I forgot this singlebar kinked rail that was 6 feet of the ground that no-one seemed to care about. We probably took somewhere near a hundred runs in the time we were there so you can imagine we had the time of our lives (not to sound like a Greenday fan or anything).

The last hour I spent some time taking pictures of my friends doing radical maneuvers since they want to show their grandkids what kind of tricky shit they did when they were young. Luckily one of them was so nice to ask me if I wanted a picture of myself as well and I could already smell my glorydays of summer on the snowboard-mag.com website so I gladly accepted his offer. Now I wouldn't want a claim to fame just for myself so I will include a bit of visual imagery from some of my fellow Dutchies as well. The weird thing was that right after I snapped a few the lights went off and the whole place went into discofevermode or some weird shit. They had all these red and purple lights going about and I felt right back in that one dirty city in my own country.

I could tell you some more about how chill it was afterwards hanging with some of the local kids and how we all drank Jupiler and ate waffles from Brussels but then I'd be making shit up and that'd be one hell of a shame. In reality we drove back in a hot and humid car with dirty shredgear spread all over the place having one of my littlest friends sitting on my lap and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way...

the author performing somesort of slide