Rory Russell roadtrip by Jonathan Paskowitz – Part I

Jonathan Paskowitz, our international brand manager was there and tells us what happened around the legendary Rory Russell in his roadtrip in Europe.

"As I arrived to Portugal a few days before, I went to Porto airport and picked up Rory Russell with the original surf hero from Portugal Pedro Lima, a 75 year old man that is not old. He is full of life and surfed before surfing ever existed in Portugal. Pedro was a diver with Jacques Cousteau and pioneered body surfing in Europe long before there were even surfers in the European community.

We only stayed one day in Porto then drove to Lisbon the next day to meet the press and show the fall line to the Portuguese press and local magazines. We had a great time in Lisbon on the beach on a cliff overlooking one of Lisbon’s premier surf beaches. Rory even went into the water to help some kids surf with Bryan Porter our man from the states. The kids looked like they had a great time and Rory and Bryan we very funny with them. Back to Porto again and we started off on the Rory Road Trip to Spain and France. We picked up the guys Joao Diogo and the Lightning Bolt team riders Alexandre Ferreira and Pedro Soares, our new friends on the next part of this adventure. We drove north out of Porto to the boarder of Spain, rocky green mountains and little villages with farms. Really an incredible rich and glorious view whenever you looked out the window.

The Europeans maps are a joke!!! So hard to read. We missed our turn so many times I thought we would never get there. Mundaka was our first stop and we were trying desperately to get there. Finally after so many turns, we got to Mundaka and found the hotel Mundaka. It was now 04:00 am!!!!

We woke up the next day to meet our Spanish salesman Eduardo, great guy with a lot of style, he brought his charming girlfriend with him and was going to take us to meet a writer from a Spanish surfing magazine as well as a famous surfboard collector in the area.

We headed off for a little adventure in the area next to us in Bilbao. We all really wanted to see the city and have a dinner in the main town, we were really surprised to see the architecture and the modern mixed with the old.

In Mundaka the surf was really small but you could see the incredible potential of the waves there. We said goodbye to our new friends there and dropped into the Mundaka surf shop before leaving on the way up the coast to our next stop France. We would stop on the boarder to see the Pukas surfboard shop on the way.