NYC Trip Photos: Day 1.

I just returned home from a four day, action packed trip to New York City with Mike V. The legendary East Coast skate spot, The Brooklyn Banks, will be closing mid-January 2010 until sometime in 2014 and Mike wanted to go to The City one more time to skate The Banks, shoot some photos and video. As always, I brought my point and shoot camera along for the trip and snapped off a few photos along the way. On with the show…

The trip begins at the Los Angeles International Airport. Here we are inside the American Airline VIP lounge killing a little time before our overnight, redeye flight into New York.

View from the VIP lounge.

Our terminal was all decked out for Christmas.

Leaving Los Angeles.

Landed in New York. First stop… the automated teller machine.

“You’re at Kennedy Airport… New York… Biggest airport in the world…”

Loading up the cab for our ride into The City.

This is the ceiling of our hotel lobby. Straight out of the movie Tron.

After checking into the hotel and not sleeping at all on the overnight flight, we hit the streets and started skating from midtown all the way downtown to get to the Banks. Some where along the way it started raining so we made a detour to the Element store in Times Square for an inpromptu appearance.

Element NYC.

Here is Mike helping a fellow skater choose a new deck. Guess which one he got?

The store was pretty busy with holiday shoppers and it didn’t take long for people to start to recognize Mike and the autographs and photos began.

We left the Element store and continued on our way down to The Banks. It was still raining but we thought since the banks were partially covered by bridges, it might still be skateable in the rain. We were wrong as you can see.

Sean Cronan came out to shoot photos of Mike but the session was rained out. We will try again tomorrow.

Where are we?

The rain forced us underground for our trip back to the hotel.

After a quick stop back at our hotel we were off to have dinner and meet up with some of Mike’s family. Here is Mike and his nephew, Matthew.

This is the Christmas Tree in front of Rockefeller Center. You know… NBC and stuff.

After dinner the rain had stopped so we walked (Mike loves to walk and will hoof it anywhere.) down to the Bowery to catch a Matisyahu show at Webster Hall. A friend of ours manages Matisyahu so we got hooked up with free tickets and the VIP treatment.

After the show it was more walking back to the hotel for my first sleep since Friday night.

Stay tuned for pics from day 2.

-Larry