Upon arriving at Gary's, I found out he had injured his toe and was limping around pretty badly. We decided not to go camping Friday night and see how his toe felt in the morning. Instead we decided to spent the evening watching Joe Kid. Sure enough there was Gary in the movie. Even cooler for me, on Gary's bike were the prototype fork pegs I'd custom made for him bitd (Note: Gary said he still has those original fork pegs and he's going to give them to me when he pulls them out of the attic.)
Gary pulled out his stash of old BMX magazines and we spent the rest of the evening flipping through them. I got to see my picture from Saddleback in the July '79 BMX Plus, and of course, Gary's cover of June '82 BMX Plus. He also found out he has volume 1 issue 2 of BMX Plus. Pretty cool. At one point I found another picture of me in a magazine, I think it was a parting shot in Super BMX. I called Gary's wife Linda over to show her the picture and pointed out where I'm standing behind the Van's halfpipe at Knott's Berry Farm. She looks at me in the picture and says "Wow! that really is you". After about a minute she finally looks at the whole picture and realizes the picture is actually of Gary riding the halfpipe. We all got a big laugh out of it.
On Saturday, we got up and Gary's toe was still hurting. So, rather than go camping, we decided to go to the ABA Winter Nationals and watch the races. We ran into some of Gary's old BMX friends, Dereck Butterfield, Cody Smart and Eric Rupe to name a few. At one point we were in the infield watching the races, Gary turns to me and says "Can you believe that I won 15 EX at this race, 25 YEARS AGO!" To capture the moment I took this picture of him with one of the 15 EX Semi's in the starting gate behind him. It would be cool if the eventual 15 EX winner, Travis "The Rock" Ohrazda, was in that Semi.
All together it turned into a great BMX weekend. The fish will have to wait for another day.
[ April 03, 2006, 05:20 PM: Message edited by: Liam Haselhorst ]