By Jay Bone

It was a pretty simple plan, I had been in Varna, Bulgaria for a week and Cates wanted to come out and shoot some footage for the new Death video and hang out for a while. There aren’t too many flights out to Varna, so his trip ended up only being 3 days, which meant that the pressure was on! He arrived at Varna Airport, after his flight was delayed by 3 hours…. And discovered that British Airways had managed to lose his board. Things were really not going in his favour, we had a plan to go to Sofia too, and with no board we were going to lose valuable time trying to sort it out.

We headed back to the apartment, and after a few phonecalls Cates managed to organise a new rig, the next morning we picked it up and hooked up with a family friend, his son skated and offered to take us to Albena and show us some spots.

We took the 1 hour drive out to Albena and the place was a complete ghost town. In winter all the resorts are closed and boarded up, which means you pretty much have a free reign over the place. We cruised around the place looking for signs of life and came across a few interesting thing,s one of which was a concrete mini golf course. Perfect Cates terrain. After a few slams and a lot of earsplitting laughing he put down a frontside rock and roll, and did a line which may or may not appear in the new video. We skated around some more and came across around 30 or so pools, all empty, but none of them transitioned! Cates managed to ride one of the water slides into the empty pool, and we had fun skating there for a while.

With the tight schedule we still had loads to fit in, so we went to the station and booked tickets for the overnight train to Sofia, it didn’t leave until 10.30pm so we went for dinner and went back to the apartment to pack our stuff. When we got to the train we had a shared sleeper with 2 Bulgarian guys, and it turned out they both had serious snoring problems, neither of us got much sleep and Cates kept whistling to try and wake them up, but to no avail.

We pulled into Sofia station around 7am. The streets were pretty deserted so we had a roll around, taking the piss out of each other and generally messing about. We stumbled across a guy walking round the streets in ull snowbord getup, including wearing goggles. We asked him directions to MBK, a spot Cates had on his to-do list and before long we were there, a sick spot with perfect flat banks everywhere, and a strange bank down some stairs which were the main reason for us being there.

First time a board hit the floor security were on us. We were there literally 2 minutes and a security guard looking like a poor man’s version of Lemmy from Motorhead was kicking us out. We had pretty much resigned ourselves to not being able to skate it, but we worked out that he came around in half hour cycles, and all the locals just left when he came and returned after he had gone. We ended up spending most of the day there, getting a few tricks for the video and then we headed off to eat. I took Cates to a restaurant called Happy’s, you can get a pretty good feed for about 2 quid, so needless to say we both came away full and happy.

We had an overnight train back to Varna that night and luckily we had a cabin to ourselves, I dropped straight off and woke up in Varna the next morning.

Our flight was that day, so after a bit of shopping and another good feed we were at the airport trying to retrieve Cates’ missing board. Turns out that it was sent to Bulgaria and then sent back to Gatwick! Then I discovered it was ok to take 2 pieces of luggage into Varna with British Airways, but they won’t let you take 2 pieces out with them. After swearing never to fly with British Airways again we were soon on our way and landed back in Gatwick that night.