THE TONY FERGUSON DIARIESGirl's FIRST Euro tour It was 1993, Girl had just started, and it was our first trip to Europe. We had no team managers at that time and Rick wasn’t on the trip, so we basically had no one in charge. I remember one of the distributors picked us up at the airport, and said they were taking us to the hotel but it turned out to be a hostel. We had other random people staying in our rooms with a shared bathroom down the hall. We weren't down and told the distributor we wanted to move to a hotel but he didn’t want to, so Sheffey said “no hotel, no demos”. The next day we were moved to a 5 star hotel. Everyone was using the room phones to call home, at the time we had no idea how much hotels charged for overseas calls. Needless to say we racked up thousands of dollars on phone calls and room service, the distributor was not stoked. We were such little bastards that after travelling through a few countries, the van was getting trashed. We were tagging all over the inside, and kept each other amused with a game of ripping off the headrests. When we got to Belgium we weren’t feeling the hotel or the demo the next day so we started talking about leaving. Koston said "I think I know how to get to Amsterdam, we should go” so the next day we skipped the demo and Eric drove to Amsterdam. He has always been good with direction and has an internal GPS but I still don’t know how he pulled that one off. When we got there we found a hotel and checked in, leaving the van out front. I remember us going outside the next morning and the van was gone, we figured it must have been stolen and went on with our day of skating around Amsterdam.The day after we had to call the distributor to let them know where we were, obviously they were pissed! We had racked up phone bills, wrecked the van, blew off demos and drove to Amsterdam without their knowledge. While we were breaking the news over the phone, Sheffey was like “Oh yeah, did you hear about the van? the van is gone too.” We were all dying from his nonchalant delivery. They were not happy and told us we weren't that good anyway and would never be invited back to Europe.Probably one of the best trips ever. A week later they found the van, it had been towed, and we did go back the next year.
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