Words: Sydney Pizza
Checking in right now from La Tranche-Sur-Mer, France! Our first week is complete and it has flown by. We departed on Sept. 30 th in the afternoon and arrived early morning on October 1 st in Madrid. After putzing around for a couple hours, we caught about three trains, and one layover in Toulouse France, which was stunning, we landed in Biarritz France for the first leg of our trip!
It has always been a dream of mine to go to France for the contest in La Tranche-Sur-Mer, and this year, after deciding to take the year off of doing the UST tour, we made plans to head to Europe in the Fall for a little recon trip and then some good vacation time. Biarritz is easily one of the coolest towns I have ever been to. It is a surfing capital of Europe, that has surfing flowing through its veins, everyone from the young groms to the grandmas down the street either surf or rip on a boog!
We spent about five days there including time for the contest! It was not like any of our regularly scheduled programming at SkimUSA, which was a good change of pace after a long season. With 21 total competitors (two being women) the contest was done in a day! Through pretty strong onshore winds and some intermittent rain, we survived and had the greatest time! Elian and I doubled up on gold, which was great but better than that are the friendships that we have created with the French community. The biggest thank you to everyone at Skim Evolution and Skim France!
The Sunday after the contest there was a strong chance that the sider at San Sebastian/Donostia was going to be working, so we all packed up for the day and headed about 40 minutes south and stayed all day for the sider! It was different from any other sider that I had been to, not the longest sider but had a lot of push and was super fun! The best part was the whole crew sesh at the sider, there’s no feeling quite like that one!
From there we are now in a rental car, and drove up to Le Ponte du Cap Ferret, to try and catch a liner/sider which ended up working like crazy! The craziest difference so far is the tide swings here. The ocean draws back more than you could imagine from dead high to dead low, so inherently it drops out and fills in very quickly. Arriving at Cap Ferret, we got there at the end of high tide so we were able to get a sold 45 minute session in! It was so much fun that we ended up staying the night and caught another liner down the beach the next day!
That takes us to these past few days arriving in La Tranche-Sur-Mer to meet up with the Spain, French and Portuguese crews along with some of our favorite Zap team riders, Yahir Valencia, Mega, and Romario de Sousa! We are here truly living a dream of mine, with friends, good vibes, and even better food! We will catch up after the contest and in the next few days!