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‘Ice’ rink offers adventure
By MATTHEW WAITE © St. Petersburg Times, published December 22, 2000 NEW PORT RICHEY -- I was skeptical about plastic ice. Where I come from, ice is a road hazard, not something you put in your tea to make summer bearable. In Nebraska, your retention pond is your very own rink from Thanksgiving until nearly Easter. I know ice. I learned some of life's lessons on ice. Gems like trying to impress your future wife early in the relationship by saying "Hey, watch this" and then sliding across an iced-over parking lot on your loafers can only end badly. You get laughed at, and you have a funny limp the rest of the night. On skates, I learned -- the very, very hard way -- that girls can play hockey, too. Especially the one that hit me so hard my butt ached, my teeth throbbed and hey, how did I end up on my back? So when I was sent by the Pasco Times to skate -- on ice skates I imported, probably illegally, from up North -- on plastic ice, I was suspicious. With visions of workers' comp claims dancing in my head, I stepped onto the slab of interlocked 50 pound plastic slabs in Jay B. Starkey Wilderness Park on Thursday and gave an innocent push. I skidded forward, not far, not fast. Yup, it's plastic all right. Dense polyurethane to be exact, coated with liquid silicone to give it kind of an oily slickness. But I was skating -- awkwardly -- and it was sunny and more than 60 degrees outside, and I was in Florida. Ice skates and a sunburn; my family back home won't believe this. And that's kind of the point, the owner of the slab, Bruce Hyland said. "This has a purpose," he said. "You can't put real ice out here. It's the second best. "It's a thing you can do where you can't do." Hyland has been doing the skating rink thing for a while. He left his rink in Toronto behind for the Ice Capades in California for three years, and then came to Florida, where he ran the ice rink in Countryside Mall in Clearwater for 15 years. He hung that up this year, and now travels around with his plastic ice rink as a side business. Hyland knows, as does any transplanted Northerner who skated a bunch when they lived in colder climates, that the plastic isn't the same. "The skaters don't like it," he said. "The kids who never skated before love it." On Thursday, a father sat on the side, skates on, just watching his daughter go round and round. He had played hockey in the Northeast, he said, and couldn't skate a circle on the plastic. His daughter couldn't stop. I'm not graceful, by any means, on a pair of skates. I realized in the parking lot that it had been three years since I skated last. Skating forward came back relatively quick for me. Skating backward ended with me on my backside. And I wasn't alone sitting down. But you'd expect that in Florida. Alex Fasano with the Pasco County Parks and Recreation Department said the "ice" skating rink was just another way they were expanding their annual Wilderness Wonderland. Area groups and the Pasco parks department decorate the cabins and light up the trees. This year they added skating to bring a little North to the South. "We just want everyone to have a good time," Fasano said. - Matthew Waite can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6247 or (800) 333-7505, ext. 6247. His e-mail address is waite@sptimes.com. Want to skate?Skating will continue from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. today and Saturday at Jay B. Starkey Wilderness Park, 10500 Wilderness Park Road in New Port Richey. The Wilderness Wonderland drive-through viewing of the lights is from 6 to 9 p.m. through Saturday. There is no charge for either event.
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