Get on the Highway

Early this spring I had the opportunity to travel with Neil Sanders on the great roadtrip. He had this idea to get a motorhome or two and take ten riders across the Southwest as far as maybe even Kentucky and make a video that was kind of like Roadfools.At the time it sounded like a great idea. The rider list included the usual superheros crew of Randy Spangler, Gareth Dyer and Aaron Peters. Add to that Darren Miller, Cory Derpak, Cam Zinc, Eric Porter, Aaron Hodgkins, Caile Noble and Cory Leclerc and you have an interesting recipe. We started off in Santa Cruz and then drove to Sacramento to shoot some dirt jumping and downhill. That’s when things pretty much completely fell apart. That’s right, less than a week into a three-week trip and it had already come apart. We had lost Darren and Caile to injuries, and the 12-passenger van that was supposed to replace the RV (don’t ask) needed some serious work and was stuck in Squamish. Then it started to rain. To make a long story really short we hung out in LA for a while then drove as far as Sedona and back. Lots of crazy stuff went down, most of it didn’t involve riding. Here are some of the highlights from the memory of Darren Miller.


“Neil wanted to take ten of the best riders he knew and travel in a motorhome across as much of the country as he could in a month and get enough footage to make a video. The idea of ten riders trying to find ten types of riding, while traveling in a motorhome on a tight schedule sounded pretty chaotic. But pretty much everything went according to plan. As long as the plan was to have no plan, and if for some reason we did have a plan, well we needed to change it.


The four days we were in L.A. it rained most of the time. So we all went and saw sponsors. Suddenly, everyone has all these new parts and has to put them on immediately. From noon until two in the morning people were out in my garage bleeding brakes, swapping forks, wheels, seats, you name it. Watching everyone, especially Gareth, try to put the latest and greatest onto their rig was non-stop entertainment. It was such chaos, there was crap everywhere. Each rider had their own schwag pile of bike parts and new t-shirts in some corner of my house or garage. It was sweet.


We went to the Hoover Dam and made a bunch of dam jokes, saw some dam people, ate some dam hot dogs, walked up some dam stairs, and took some dam pictures. Then we realized that because the wind blows upstream, when it hits the dam, there is a dam updraft. So you could spit off the dam and it would fly like twenty feet up in the air and hit some dam people. It was dam funny.


No matter where we went we caused a scene. Whether it was wise cracks about people's mullets and fanny packs at Burger King, or ice cube wars at the steakhouse, you couldn’t miss us. We were loud and if you sat close enough, you had a good chance of being hit with shrapnel. It was always fun to see people's faces as our crew rolled in, and then to watch them leave as soon as they could.


Anytime you get this many people together, there is always someone who has to get laughed at so everyone else can laugh. We chose Cory Derpak. There were many good times at his expense. But like everything we did, we took it a little too far. We stole some really hot peppers from the Mexican restaurant and pinned Cory down and shoved the peppers in his mouth. Cory’s a fighter though and didn’t give up easy, it took five of us to finally catch him and pin him. In the process the peppers got squished and juice ran all over his face. Poor Derpak, he had some kind of gnarly reaction and his face broke out in a huge rash.”


To really understand what went on you’d have to have been on the trip, but buying the video might help. I can’t say for sure cause I haven’t actually seen it yet. I do know there will be some great riding from all the riders listed above, as well as kids like Cameron McCaul, who joined us for the first couple of days.

--Ian Hylands
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