DIRTBOWL! DIRTBOWL! DIRTBOWL!

The dirtbowl lives! I just finished digging out the last portion today. Holy crap, that was a lot of digging. I don't know if I had unrealistic expectations or anything, but when I thought of this day, I had thought of something like the following occurring:

It was a vision of me blasting huge airs while fireworks went off. Music was blaring as the Snow Birds flew directly overhead in perfect formation while the neighbours cheered, my wife wept tears of pride and my kids went nuts. Somewhere, just outside the edge of the crowd, Chuck Norris would make eye contact with me long enough to nod his silent approval. Yeah. F-Yeah!!

Well, it was more like me being so freaking tired and sore that I could barely ride my bike. My hands are a mess of callused blisters. The sides of the bowl are still pretty soft, but I am getting it packed down. I managed to pop off the spine transfer thing into the pool. Here, my 7 year old captures a picture of me entering the pool.



Here's a pic of my 7 year old testing out the berm wall. You can't really go any higher on the berm yet because I haven't packed it down. I'm still kind of planning how that will take place. Maybe I will get a water filled lawn roller?



This is his first time riding anything like this. I can't possibly imagine how cool this would have been for me if I had one of these in my backyard when I was a kid. Hopefully, the kids stick with the sport and have a lot of fun. If not, they better enjoy skateboarding, because the halfpipe will be built next summer and that will cost some actual money. All that I spent on the dirtbowl was the price of a shovel. ($15.99 at Cdn Tire)



I was reading online about how some guys can get bummed out about all the 'other' aspects of BMX. The trendiness. The peer pressure. The respect or lack of it. For me, this backyard dirtbowl is the pinnacle of what BMX was supposed to be. When I was a kid, if we could find a spot to ride and some dirt, we would just use our imagination and play on our bikes. On more than one occasion, I'm quite certain I said something like, "wouldn't it be awesome if you could build a quarter pipe out of dirt?!" We even built 'lake jumps' into really gross cow ponds. That was awesome until one of us got a nasty ear infection. Yuck.

But I look at the dirtbowl in my backyard and I can't help but smile. For me, this is pure BMX. Go play.