Bill Allen Interview in Albion

Open publication - Free publishing - More albion

RAD in the Coolest BMX Museum in France

Bob Haro @ "Beton Hurlant", le FILM ! from OSBMXF.COM-FB/SR on Vimeo.

Roughing It

Upon our arrival to Calgary, Canada in the Vans motor home we had to find a place to park it. This was after all our only mode of transportation. So Everett found a empty lot one block away from the hotel. We unloaded all our gear and moved into the International Hotel Calgary. We had a very cool two bedroom suite with a mini kitchen and dining table. It was very nice and is similar to what exists today. My brother and I shared the room with two beds and Beatle took the living room with a pull out. This poor hotel took a beating from bikes crammed in elevators to the pranks that seemed endless.

Laundry day was us putting all our dirty clothes in pillow cases and schlepping them to the motor home. It was a short ride to the laundry mat and then back to the hotel. I think this where I learned the mantra, "you pack it, you carry it" from the more seasoned Rosecrans travelers.

One evening the production team organized an evening to go see Tina Turner in concert. My mom loved her so they were off. Leaving two boys alone in a hotel isn't such a good idea. We somehow got hooked up with Laura Jacoby and another boy, maybe her brother. All our parents were together for the evening. Well for some reason we are in Laura's room and there was a shopping cart. I have no idea how they got the cart up there but it was there. Given the recent learning's that bags full of water off 23 stories makes an awesome exploding sound, we decided to remove the trash bags from the cans in the room, fill them with water and go big. The cart actually was critical in getting the bags to the patio for the heave over. We just thought this was so funny as they landed on the concrete deck below with a thundering noise.

There was also some down time that we utilized to do some ass sliding into the pool. The hotel pool was located in the basement and was surrounded with tile. Tile that became very slippery when wet. Well this provided hours of fun as we would run, sit, slide, and flop into the pool. Silly now that I think about it.

I learnt to short sheet a bed on that trip. Brad Cowen and I did it to his brother Wynn with an extra layer of ashtray sand from the hallway. The short sheeting couldn't be enough, so we had to take it a step further with some dirty cigarette infused sand. Why not do it right.

There was also an incident where a couch from someones room made it to the lobby. I wasn't directly involved with this, but knowing me, I probably played a moral support role. Imagine the peoples eyes when the lobby doors open to a couch in the elevator. It came back up eventually and found its original home.

My brother, Brad and myself discovered that you could manually pry open the elevator doors as it was moving and stop mid floors. We would then climb out repeat this until we got board. Or until we got stuck and waited for 45 minutes until the fire department got us out. There were never any repercussions  however this was something we did not reattempt.

There is a lot more to tell, but I will save those for a later date.

Jeremy