Skateboarding
Skateboarding
Dare you join the Transylvania skate mission?
Johan Stuckey, Aidan Campbell, Philipp Schuster, Vladik Scholz, Mihnea Groseanu and Barney Page stagecoach it on a skate adventure through Dracula country.
6 min
Dare you join the Dracula skate mission?
Johan Stuckey, Aidan Campbell, Philipp Schuster, Vladik Scholz, Mihnea Groseanu and Barney Page traverse Dracula country!
Let's park the novelty fangs for a moment, this was the biggest skate tour of Romania ever undertaken and what a swinging team we had.
Johan Stuckey, Aidan Campbell, Vladik Scholz, Philipp Schusterand Barney Page all signed up despite their better judgements for a trip which would take us through Transylvania in search of new terrain to spill blood on.
The Romanian province of Transylvania means 'The land beyond the forest' and is home to a large proportion of Europe's wolves, bears, sudden rolling fog and, of course, the legend of Count Dracula. It also has loads to skate, guaranteeing that our trip to search and destroy skate spots would be yet another brap-worthy endeavour.
How could it not be?
The focus of the trip was connecting with Romania's first real breakout talent, Mihnea Groseanu.
Groseanu has gone from being local hero to Romania's emissary in skateboarding, and no doubt many of our Californian crew will have bumped into him this last summer as he made his way to skateboarding's Shangri-La to experience the LA skate life.
With his local knowledge, Groseanu led our marauders from Bucharest through the Transylvanian cities of Cluj-Napoca (which has a quality skatepark) and Brasov, home of Transylvania's other small skate scene.
Mihnea Groseanu – Front Crooks
© Sam McGuire
Aidan Campbell - Hurricane
© Sam McGuire
Vladik Scholz – Kickflip in to Ollie over
© Sam McGuire
Mihnea Groseanu
© Sam McGuire
Although we naturally dipped into some of the local lore by scaring ourselves witless around various medieval castles that may or may not have once been home to the main man himself, in truth our overwhelming impression of Romania, and the province of Transylvania in particular, was that the experience was beautiful, mellow, welcoming and fun.
The ragged band eventually made it back to base camp in Bucharest after nearly two weeks of solid skate-adventuring on one of the deepest skate trips in memory. Despite a couple of heavy slams from Stuckey, we were glad to have escaped with no major pains in the neck.
Delve a little deeper into how Patrik Wallner and the crew came up with this project in this behind the scenes recap story.
