Sometime at night, at the Croatian border. A double-decker bus packed with young people who have not showered for a long time and who, after several attempts, simply cannot manage to stack the right number of passports - 25 passports from seven nations - and hand them over to the visibly irritated border guard. Between all the tired, mischievous faces, socks, underpants, guitars, skateboards, coffee cups and tetrapacks full of wine: a concrete mixer. “What the hell are you doing here?” - “Hmm… We’re on vacation and visiting friends!”

In 2015, we set off on a tour that skateboarding and the rest of the world had never seen before. In a four-week tour, we traveled through Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Denmark. Tours among and for professional skateboarders are actually nothing unusual, they usually go like this: a small group of skaters go to a place and leave again after a certain time - hopefully with bags full of glossy footage… We did it a little differently. On our tour, we covered 3,500 km across Europe and crossed the Alps twice in a vehicle that doesn’t go faster than 75 km/h, even downhill on German autobahns, and on a route that, God knows, doesn’t match these characteristics. In our luggage we had a large group of friends, a concrete mixer, building materials, tools, good food and good music and the following mission: We visited DIY crews in different places in all countries with our traveling construction site to support them in expanding their spots on site and to network with each other.

The tour

When we arrived, we were greeted by over 40 people in some places, people took their clothes off, there were champagne showers and live concerts and when we left it was clear that the friendships we had made here would last long after the tour. After all, there is hardly a better way to really get to know people than to spend four days with them in such intensity. Some of the places were unrecognizable, so many ramps were built in the space of a day or two. And if these places remain, then the ramps will remain.

At every stop, two to four people got on, others got off again and so we always had a new crew made up of a wide variety of nations. It was precisely this mixed crew that made our trip special. While most skate tours are organized for a small elite of very good skateboarders, almost anyone could join us here. Sure, you had to do something for it, but if you’re not an ass and you don’t mind working on the concrete and occasionally washing up, you’ll be welcomed with open arms. And everyone in the existing crew was willing to sacrifice a little bit of their personal comfort to make this extraordinary journey possible for new people.

The tour ended in Copenhagen, where together with the local builders we built the final parkour for the 2015 Copenhagen Open Finals, one of the most famous international competitions for the world’s best skateboarders, on a remote industrial site.