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Chicago, IL 7-24-10 After a very fun week in Nashville area, I went home for just over 48 hours, and then headed up to Chicago for a BMX Dew Tour event. They have changed some of the Dew Tours from a full multi sport event, to only a single sport (such as BMX). But they still incorporated an fmx demo at them. Then they have 3 events that are full multi sport with Skate, BMX, and FMX contests. So anyways, headed up to Chicago for a demo with Jimmie McGuire, JJ Romans and myself!I flew in Thursday morning, as we were supposed to have practice Thursday evening for a local news crew. But something happened and they moved our set up. The spot they moved us to had some BMX viewing tower structures in our runway. BMX Dirt Finals was supposed to happen Fri night, so we just cancelled practice all together & waited for the BMX Dirt stuff to get moved after their finals. Friday, we knew we were going to have the whole day off. Basically just hung out & relaxed at the hotel in the morning. Then Jimmie, his Dad Jim, and I all went to the Field Museum to go sight seeing for a while. Some other friends met us there and we all walked around for several hours. Jimmie & I had never seen a Dinosaur exhibit before, so it was pretty neat. I’ll try to throw some pics up of some of the stuff. They have Sue, a T-Rex that was found in South Dakota 90% complete and still intact! They also have a baby mammoth, Lyuba, that fell into a lake & froze. It preserved the mammoth so well for over 43 Million years, that scientists were able to see what the mammoth had to eat before it died….pretty crazy stuff! The Field museum was only a few blocks away from the parking lot of Soldier Field where the Dew Tour was being held. So we walked back, hoping to get to see BMX Dirt Finals. On the way it started sprinkling, so we walked thru the parking garage instead of outside….by the time we reached the other side of the garage, it looked like a monsoon outside. People were running into the garage to take cover from the storm. It was lightning, thundering, and rain coming down sideways (remember this is the “windy city”). They even ran all the workers and volunteers out of the tents and trailers at the Dew Tour, and made everyone come into the parking garage. So then you have a couple thousand people standing in a parking garage watching it rain and there are 20-40 BMX athletes who brought their bike with them. Yep you better believe it turned into an impromptu BMX flat land contest in the parking garage! Unfortunately security came and broke that up….I thought they may have a riot on their hands at that point, but everyone was pretty mellow about it. After being held captive in the garage for an hour or so, they finally called off the event and sent everyone home. So, that was pretty much it for Friday. Saturday we were so  rt of on a holding pattern. Because the dirt towers were in our run way and they postponed dirt until Saturday, we had to wait until their event was over. Woke up to more rain, they had the bmx dirt course all tarped Fuzzy Hall and his crew did a fantastic job of drying out the course, but it didn’t stop raining til almost noon. So they practiced, but again postponed dirt finals until 5pm (we were supposed to ride at 2 and 5pm). Then 5pm, they ended up running the BMX Vert final, moving dirt back until 7pm. At that point they finally just cancelled our stuff completely. Knowing that even after the dirt event was over, it would take an hour or so to move stuff out of our runway. So, basically I got to hang out all day at the BMX Dew Tour and watch the guys kill it! Michael Spinner did a quadruple tail whip on a box jump. That is spinning the back end of the bike FOUR times around, absolutely crazy, several 900’s and 1080’s, 720 tailwhips. The BMX dirt course was insane, I don’t think I would jump through that on a pit bike, it was HUGE! Front flip tail whip attempts on dirt, they had a cool jump on/jump off thing, I’ve never seen that for BMX. Just a killer BMX event…makes me wanna break out my 20”!!!That pretty much sums up the Chicago Dew Tour trip; it was a fun vacation for me at least! I think I have next weekend off, the Ponca City Amateur Nationals are going on, so I may swing by up there and try to watch one day, a Randy Travis concert somewhere near OKC on Friday night, may hit that up. But the next real event for me is Craig Morgan’s Charity Ride Aug 7-8th. Til then…… Cowboy Kenny #690 |
