Tim Wade's Blog

That’s right ladies and ball lifters, it is….

This Week’s Stoke Newsletter!!!

Where, oh where, have the bulls run off to?

Given the unprecedented volume of calls pertaining to the running bull’s well-being post San Fermin, Stoke Towers decided to call the A.H.T.D.M (Association of Half Tonne Death Machines) and find out what becomes of our testicled friends once the final tourist has been gored.

The press officer there was pressed for time, but sent me a press release, press. So here it is:

“Contrary to popular belief the bulls are not actually killed in the ‘bull fights’ which take place every evening after the morning’s mad scramble. Like in all good, professional, shows our bulls are highly trained actors who practice for months in advance with the ‘matadors’. For those of you who watched the ‘bull fight’, the blood you saw was little more than corn syrup, and the violence choreographed, like in your WWE. The spectacle is only believed to be true by the mentally challenged, young, and, of course, ignorant tourists.

All of the bulls, having completed their yearly goring obligations, pass the off season in the Pyrenean foothills frolicking amongst daffodils and mounting saucy milker after saucy milker, enjoying both their time away from terrified humans and the emptying of their ample testicles”.

So worry no more, concerned hippy, all of your favourite bulls will be there next year, ready to scare the absolute shit out of you again.

Water Sports.

And I’m not talking about people pissing on each other (we here at Stoke Towers understand and even participate in all of the sexual fringes, we just try not to mix business with sticky pleasure). I’m talking about surfing, chucking on some rubber, waxing up your stick, and trying to slot your way into some tight, wet, caverns.

The Stoke Surfari runs year round, passing its summers in Zarautz, North West Spain, and its winters in Taghazoute, way down in South Morocco, where the Atlas Mountains meet the Atlantic Ocean. Both locations are regionally, and internationally, renowned surfing locations during their specific seasons. We cater for beginners, and experienced surfers, and offer, blah blah blah. This isn’t the Stoke Towers communication that you have come to know and delete. So let’s get back to some familiar territory.

Long before your dad sprouted his first pubic hair all life lived in the sea. That’s right god botherers, I said it – ALL LIFE CAME FROM THE SEA (we here at Stoke Travel respect, and represent, all of the major, and minor, religions – what is written here is merely Gravy’s opinion. See the upcoming newsletters; “Buddha, Surfing for Fatties”, “Will Your 40 Virgins Look Good in a Burkini?”, and “Jesus, Surfing Without Surfboards” – ed). That’s right, humans can claim a direct ancestor in the humble mermaid/man, just as sea bears gave evolutionary birth to the humble grizzly and trout are a close cousin to pigeons.

It’s just that, like Ariel in the Disney classic “Mermaid Tails”, we got the idea one day that we’d like to leave the sea and pass our time on the land. I’m not sure if our ancestors were pursuing princes with dutch hairstyles, but between you and me I hope they had better taste. But we made the journey out of the soup, and we stayed, because it proved a practical environment for the maximum enjoyment of some of our favourite pursuits. Drinking beer in the sea sucks, as salty, fishy brine breaches the bottle from time to time. Smoking durries? Come on! And as for copulation, if one of the scrowlers breaks the seal, all the lube is washed away. Shithouse. So it is for good reason we have stayed on the land.

But we still have a connection to the sea, going back to our merman and maid days, when we’d hunt oceanic hares, the elusive aquatic ostrich and deep sea racing wombats with our tridents and whips made of seaweed and peppered with tiny, stingy, barnacles. So it goes, summer in, summer out, that we make the pilgrimage home, back to the sea. And that is why surfing, that’s right, surfing, is so much more than a really fun sport, that makes one inexorably attractive to the opposite sex. Check out this passage from Charles Darwin’s “Boozin’ and Cruisin’ the South Pacific” I found in the Stoke Towers’ library:

“… and part of the ceremony, after the beers had been finished and Bundy and Coke just cracked, some foolhardy souls would grab their thrusters and, cheered on by those too pissed to stand, let alone surf, paddle out the back. When I inquire to one of the savages what exactly the ceremony signifies, he says in a dialect that I can barely comprehend, “they’re juz, fuck it, surfin’ out, like, there man. Where you from anyway? New Zealand”, at which point I retreat and he vomits. It wasn’t until I was on my boat, and with the aid of my translator that I could discern what he was saying, “They are just, for God, surfing, out like mermen”. Which completely reinforced my early claims that man is descended from the merfolk (I came to this conclusion after seeing first-mate Downes in an erotic situation with that dugong off Cairns), and that, indeed, they have combined their new worship of a Christian God, with an age old, internal, primal, knowledge that their ancestors rode these waves, with scaly man-tails.”

It is only a fool that argues with Charlie. So there you have it, it is our evolutionary responsible to go surfing – if you don’t you can really only expect to live half a life. Shithouse. This weekend we are running the Surf Fest weekender out of Zarautz, with buses leaving Barcelona on the Friday, and everybody cruising up the coast to sniff out whatever France has to offer, wave wise, over the weekend, before partying the night away at the annual and infamous Stoke Travel Surf Fiesta. So get involved, get your fish on, jump in the sea and lets go for a wiggle, yeeew!

Giveaway.

We have a spare seat to give away on Surf Fest. In order to claim it send me an idea for a promotion, as my brain is fried from years of drug and alcohol abuse. We’ll call it the, Promotion Promotion. Actually, if you can’t make Surf Fest I’ll even consider giving you a double pass to Tomatina, or Oktoberfest, if your promotion is worth stealing.

Stoke Travel – on the beach drinking piss since 1996

For comments, questions, death threats, indecent proposals or hate mail email gravy@stoketravel.com.