Good Morning, Campers. Your diarist has been vacationing "down" on the Jersey shore. Don't ask me why people say that they're going "down" to the shore when mostly they arrive from the west or in my case the south. It's sort of like people in Boston saying that they're going "down east" when they travel to coastal Maine.
Be that as it may, although I've done no skating since the last post, I have done some dinghy racing which you can read about here if you're interested. I've also gotten in a fair share of lazing in a beach chair reading the local paper (the Atlantic City Press) and yesterday's issue had a newsy news article in the C section of the paper entitled "Wildwood proposes synthetic ice skating rink". I read this article with great interest. Wildwood is a shore community about an hour south of where I vacation in Brigantine, New Jersey. Anyway, the city of Wildwood is looking into building a synthetic ice rink which according to the article would be outdoors and open all year long. You can read the article on-line.
A synthetic ice rink brings a number of questions to mind: What's the surface made of? Will they come out and resurface the synthetic ice ever couple hours with a synthetic Zamboni machine? Is synthetic ice slipperier than real ice? And most importantly will your diarist break synthetic bones if he touches blades or catches an edge?
But seriously folks, has anyone out in the blogosphere experienced skating on such a surface? What's it like on a nice, hot and sticky afternoon in say, August?! The thought of all that kinda makes my head swim!
In a nutshell, synthetic ice sucks. It's plastic with a slippery coating that must be reapplied frequently. I had to do an exhibition on synthetic ice many years ago and it was a horrible experience. Also ruins your blades. Enough said -- Avoid at all costs!
ReplyDeleteWow. Thanks for the heads up. Somehow the whole concept didn't seem like a good idea. There are plenty of "real" ice rinks in south Jersey.
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