Day 5 was our last full day in San Antonio and having filtered thru all of the spots we had on the checklist already, we decided to take a slightly more relaxed approach to the afternoon….
…Well not at first actually. We were doing a little spot hunting towards the downtown area and found this setup trying to park the van. Platt gave her the ol look-see, approved and after a couple interesting falls, managed to come away with something on it. I was super stoked on my filming spot in that man hole…which then quickly lead to many many jokes/accusations for the remainder of the day.
We met up with some locals for the afternoon who took us around a little, then asked us if we were down to head across town and check out this abandoned Lone Star brewery. We showed up at this place and were so blown away by how cool it was inside. It was a gigantic factory with paint peeling off the walls, roofs caving in, 5 stories of old machinery and little passageways where you felt like you could fall thru the floor at any given moment. Most of us just set our bikes down and explored for at least an hour or two. Here’s a few more snaps…
Joey, D, and Myself climbed up this sketchy ass spiral stair case up that lead up to the roof and got a great view of the San Antonio skyline.
Oh yeah so, bike riding. Needless to say, the entire team were like kids in a candy store trying to find some crazy old shit to ride. With 5 floors and probably 15-25 different areas to get lost in, the ever ambitious Eric Bahlman went on his own little solo mission and found this old dusty electrical contraption, propped her up and gave her a smith from one room to another. The entire time we were at this place, we thought we were alone. Immediately before this photo was taken, Eric was on his way downstairs to find me and Joey and bumped into this totally emaciated looking bum with no shirt on looking like he just came out of a coal mine, who was living in the factory. Raban and I were throwing rocks at the windows and we apparently woke him up, and he emerged from the shadows and scared the shit out of us. Joey, Eric, and I headed back in to shoot this smith grind real quick, then packed up and got the hell out of there.
After some much needed R&R at a local beer and food truck establishment, we decided to head back out into the night to light up a couple spots. Platt had already made it up this rail a couple times and was determined to go up to something on the flat. Unfortunately when we got the cameras out and set up he charged at the rail full force battling the crazy uphill runway, and ended up getting a flat, putting an irreparable dent in his rim, and casing the rail with his rear spokes blowing out a significant amount of them. This photo captures the actual smoke blast of his wheel exploding on impact, and his hands blowing off. Damn Joey is a good photographer huh? Alex was alright luckily and we are on the way to Empire here in Austin right now to get him a new one….later!