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eboard tour
Serial no: 37.80N-122.47W
(00) Lacroix Nazare // Nazare Lonestar
Golden Gate → Santa Monica
Two friends, two backpacks, no support: Five hundred miles of Pacific Coast Highway on electric skateboards.
If the battery dies, we walk.
// Transmissions
// File 001 · Mission brief
Ever since Marty McFly stepped onto a hoverboard, people have dreamed of carving the streets on a flying deck. Ours didn’t fly, but they did forty miles an hour, and the fat one was meant to go sixty miles on a charge. So in December 2020, with the world shut and our work prospects grim, we tried to ride from the Golden Gate to Santa Monica with nothing but what fit on our backs.
No chase vehicle, no support crew, no hotels booked. If a battery died, the plan was to walk, carrying ninety pounds of skateboard and gear. Restaurants were closed but the roads were empty and our whole life revolved around finding an outlet every twenty-odd miles.
01
Two Lacroix electric mountainboards from Montreal: the Nazare and its long-range sibling, the Nazare Lonestar. Pneumatic tyres, carbon-and-wood decks, titanium bolts, headlights, and top speeds approaching forty miles an hour. Lacroix lent us both for the trip.
02
Highway 1, the original. Fog on the Golden Gate, redwoods and switchbacks in Big Sur, a brand new road with no shoulder, the 101 at Gaviota, the Malibu traffic, and a beach at the end.
03
Talk your way into two hours on a power socket. Get as far as the light allows. Don’t get hit. Try, against every instinct, not to go too fast, because going fast eats range.
// Unit A · rider: Dom
The smaller battery. It got us there, with a lot of help from RV parks, a Ritz-Carlton and a cyclist called Mark.
// Unit B · rider: Andy
The Millennium Falcon of e-boards. It towed Dom up hills, did a hundred miles in a day, and very nearly climbed the third steepest road in America.
// Operators
Between them they’ve crossed two continents on bicycles, Norway on roller skis, and the Arctic Circle by sailboat.
Operator 01
Callsign: Gentleman Loser
The latest gear, the nicest food. He’ll do whatever it takes to get his hands on the latest tech, and make sure he’s not the one sitting in the rocket when it launches.
Operator 02
Callsign: Meat Popsicle
The guinea pig, always trying to rig a better, faster, cheaper way to do everything. He’s just as likely to crash and burn as he is to hit 88 miles an hour.
Guest · Morro Bay
First crossing: 1976
Pushed a skateboard across America at nineteen, before anyone had done it, then did it again in 1984, 2003 and 2013, and on an electric board in 2018. Find him on the map, at Morro Bay.
We’re obsessed with travel technology that will connect you to the places you travel through, instead of separating you from them, like when you’re in a box in a car, or flying in an aeroplane, and you just miss everything.
// File 002 · The route
Keep scrolling and the map rides with you: twelve days, five hundred miles, twenty-four waypoints. The story of each one follows along on the right. Tap any waypoint to jump to it.
The afternoon before, we laid out everything we’d need for the next two weeks on a rooftop deck in San Francisco and tried to make it fit on our backs or boards: hammocks, sleeping bags, chargers, cameras, spare tyres. If it didn’t, it stayed in San Francisco.
We don’t have a chase vehicle. It’s just us, so it’s what we can bring on our boards and in our backpacks.
We set off from the Golden Gate early on a Sunday at the end of November. The coronavirus pandemic was in its long tail and we’d be travelling socially distanced, eating outside, and hoping the few places still open would let two strangers on skateboards plug in for a couple of hours. Ahead: Highway 1, all the way down, which we’d get to experience almost as if we were surfing it.
The California One is one of my favorite roads in the United States, maybe the world. Just astoundingly beautiful.
By quarter past four on day one we’d reached Pacifica, where Highway 1 climbs over Devil’s Slide. It was turning into rush hour, the road ahead was all blind corners, and it was getting dark. Even if we made it up safely, we’d be coming down the other side in the dark. On day one, that did not seem like the wisest choice. So we stopped, and only then did one of us notice he’d been riding on a completely flat tyre for some time, thanks to a nail. It’s amazing how well a board rides on a flat.
So we’re gonna say discretion is the better part of valor.
Next morning, back at the stoplight in Pacifica, we waited for a gap in the traffic. Google Street View said the shoulder came back after about a mile, so the plan was simple: go. A mile straight uphill at about twenty miles an hour, and at the top, that view. On a bicycle you’d be doing three miles an hour up here with the cars stacking up behind you. On these boards you hold the traffic up for a moment, then pull away from it.
When you’re on a bike, you actually feel kind of like a dick, because you’re going about three miles an hour.
Dom’s board needed a charge, and in the middle of a pandemic the only restaurant open in Half Moon Bay was the Ritz-Carlton. We rolled up in helmets and backpacks, fully expecting to be shown the road. Instead the valets crowded round asking how far the boards could go, and let us plug in while we had a little snack. Earlier we charged from the wall of a public toilet. Toilet power. It had been that kind of day.
It’s been a pretty hard day, I’m gonna be honest.
Day three was meant to be a big one: charge Dom’s Nazare twice and get somewhere past Santa Cruz. We were getting better at this, and faster, which was its own problem: go faster and you lose range. The shoulder wasn’t great and the traffic was heavy. When the big rigs came by they’d hit debris in the road and it would explode upwards at us.
The issue with doing this in December is that we are just constantly limited by daylight.
Twenty-two miles in, with all the gear on board, a few hills and the excitement of going a bit too fast early on, the Nazare died completely. A dead board is just a 30lb cart. Andy towed Dom for a mile or so along dusty farm roads until a cyclist came along and towed us into town. Thanks, Mark!
My board is dead. Completely out. Not going anywhere. It’s basically a big heavy brick now.
One of us reached for his camera to turn it off, which always shifts your weight a little. With the remote in his other hand he either flicked the accelerator or the brakes (probably the accelerator), and the board shot out from under his feet. He took it on the shoulder and the elbow, which had pads on, and the fingertips, which had gloves on. The pads did their job. The gloves did their job. The shirt did not.
The gloves did their job. Pads did their job.
Rather than cut over the hill to Carmel, we took the long way round the Monterey Peninsula: Pacific Grove, then 17-Mile Drive through Pebble Beach to the Lone Cypress, which has been hanging on to its granite rock above the Pacific for something like 250 years. We got there with the last of the light, ten minutes before sunset, and leaned the boards on the fence for a portrait.
We woke up on day five in what we described to camera as our campsite in Carmel. It had walls, a roof and a view of the Pacific. An anonymous benefactor had heard about the trip, was impressed (or felt sorry for us), and let us stay. Probably one of the coolest things that happened on the whole trip. In the ranking of campsites, top five, easily.
Basically, an anonymous benefactor was impressed with our trip and allowed us to stay here. The view speaks for itself.
South of Carmel the road empties out and Big Sur begins: redwoods in the canyons and the ocean hundreds of feet below. It was seventy degrees in December, the visibility was perfect, and we were seeing one car every five minutes. We stopped to lean the boards against a redwood, because what else are you going to do.
It’s like 70 degrees out here. We’ve got the sun on our faces. The visibility is perfect. We’re getting like one car every five minutes.
Then came the most beautiful stretch of highway so far, which was also the trickiest. A brand new road, and no shoulder at all. There weren’t many cars, fortunately, but the trucks came round the blind corners fast, and when they did there was nowhere to go. Officially the speed limit is thirty-five; in a car at thirty-five you’d have old ladies throwing their brakes at you. Concentrating that hard makes your feet tired much faster.
It’s a known bicycle road. There are signs all over the place that say share the road. And then that’s what they give us for the shoulder.
The best riding of the trip. We’d done climbs like these on bicycles, and on a bike they’re a slog: hard work, rewarding, slow. On these boards you rocket up them. We clocked a thousand feet of climbing just like that, saw maybe three cars all morning, and found that the hard part was not going too fast. Snowboarding, you hit top speed going downhill; hitting it going up a hill is indescribable. Then you get the descent too, carving the whole empty road down towards Ragged Point, quicker through the hairpins than the RVs.
You could only do it on a board like this. Just standing around, like a rocket-powered asshole.
In Morro Bay we met Jack Smith, who in 1976, aged nineteen, decided with two friends to push their skateboards across America instead of getting summer jobs. Nobody had done it, there was no internet to ask, and the wheels were 57 millimetres. They made it from Lebanon, Oregon, to Williamsburg, Virginia, in thirty-two days. Jack did it again in 1984, 2003 and 2013, crossed the country on an electric board in 2018, used to run a skateboard museum, and the day after we met him turned sixty-four, which he planned to celebrate by riding sixty-four miles. We asked him what he’d learned.
I always tell people: when you skateboard across America, you don’t miss anything.
At Pismo Beach the plan changed. Dom put the Nazare and his gear in a rental car, a white Mustang convertible, and became the support crew. Andy kept his board, to keep it pure, and set off at dawn to ride the Lonestar from Pismo Beach to Santa Barbara, charging once in the middle of the day: almost exactly a hundred miles, the way we’d mapped it.
I’m gonna keep mine, so that we keep it pure. And I’m gonna try and just take the board as far as it’ll go.
Around lunchtime Andy reached the halfway mark: fifty miles on one charge, with around 250 pounds of rider and gear on board, and the Lonestar still going strong. It had already towed Dom up hills. So we took a detour in the rental car, down the long road to Jalama Beach, a long way from anywhere, purely to ride the boards along the sand for a bit. Then back to Highway 1, and on.
You’re looking at somewhere around 250 pounds. And this board just keeps on going.
At Las Cruces, Highway 1 joins the 101, and the 101 is a proper freeway. Dom paced Andy from the Mustang at thirty, thirty-two miles an hour. For the most part the shoulder was fine, until a narrow bridge near Gaviota, where it vanished completely. There’s a button cyclists are meant to press to make a warning light flash; Andy didn’t even have time to press it, and just waited for a gap while people went by at eighty or ninety. He’d done about seventy miles, the Lonestar still had plenty of range, and this just wasn’t fun. He got in the car.
I have nothing to prove. The Lonestar is plenty, has plenty of range. Like, this just isn’t fun.
Dom dropped Andy where the route leaves the freeway, and he rode on through the UC Santa Barbara campus into town. Then the bad news: we’d lost the GoPro mounted on Dom’s shoulder, one of our two always-running cameras, with four days of on-the-fly interviews and riding footage on it that we hadn’t backed up, because the cards were so big. So we went to In-N-Out for pity milkshakes, and tried to order them at the drive-through.
So that’s like four days of GoPro footage. Gone.
By now our lives revolved around finding an outlet. RV parks are your best friend on a trip like this: you ask at the gate, and they’re usually cool about it. This state campground let us plug in while we sat on a bench for two hours. On a bike tour you work hard for a few hours and then take a long lunch. On these boards we spent as much time sitting around as riding: an hour at twenty-five miles an hour to empty a battery, two hours to fill it, another hour riding, and that’s the day. You’d be amazed how many restaurant signs have a socket for the Christmas lights.
I think this is gonna permanently change the way I just look at infrastructure in general, where I’m just constantly scanning.
We set off on the last morning at sunrise, along the farm fields of the Oxnard plain with the mountains black against the sky. The plan: ride to Malibu, charge up in Malibu, then Santa Monica. Last day.
We’ll head on to Malibu, charge up in Malibu, and then Santa Monica. And we’re done. Last day.
At the Los Angeles County line we stopped for the obligatory photograph with the sign. Malibu next, then the beach path to Santa Monica, about thirty miles to go.
The low point of the trip came on the last day. Through Malibu the PCH is not bike friendly: the bike lane is full of parked cars, construction and bins, so you’re constantly forced out into the road, and although the limit is thirty-five, everybody’s doing sixty. Then, just before the beach path, a shirtless man sitting on the kerb saw Dom go by, didn’t like it, and rushed at him yelling. Then he turned, saw Andy, and threw an arm bar at him. There was too much traffic to swerve, so Andy hunkered down and it bounced off his chest. He stayed on his board. It was the only time on the whole trip anyone attacked us.
It’s the only part of the trip where we were physically assaulted.
And then we were done: Santa Monica, five hundred and something miles from the Golden Gate. Technically about four hundred on the Nazare and five hundred on the Lonestar. Our favourite part, without hesitation: coming out of Big Sur, cruising down those roads with one car every twenty minutes. Would we do a tour like this again? Yes, on the Lonestar or something with even more range, with a slightly different kit list. It’s a really cool way to travel.
We’re done. We did it. We’re in Santa Monica. Five hundred and something miles.
The day after the finish, before sending the boards back to Lacroix, we drove to Highland Park in Los Angeles to test one last claim on the website: that the Lonestar can climb a 40% incline. Eldred Street is the third steepest road in America. Andy rolled to the bottom, came to a complete stop so there’d be no momentum, and pulled the trigger. He got almost to the top before the motors started clicking, and jumped off rather than damage them. With a smooth street and a run-up, it would probably have made it. As it was: very impressive.
I am, by the way, 220 pounds. I’m not a little dude.
// File 003 · The film
The whole thing: twelve days, five hundred miles, two boards, one Mustang, no chase vehicle. Filmed by the two of us on whatever was strapped to our shoulders, chests and helmets at the time.
// File 004 · Credits
Dom Smith and Andy Robinson: an Emmy-winning multimedia studio in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Los Angeles. They tell big stories for regular-sized people: documentaries, animation, explainers, and the occasional ill-advised trip on whatever new machine will let them.
Every camera on this trip was running all the time, which is how you end up with weeks of footage and no idea where anything is. DISKO is the media library we built to fix that: it finds any shot by what’s on screen, who’s in it and what was said, all on your own Mac. Your footage. Your machine. Your rules.