Built by the city of Temecula, about 60 miles north of San Diego, in June, 1996, in a public park, the full-acre skatepark consists of two components, a 60-foot-diameter double-hipped bowl, and a large open street area with numerous banked walls, bowls, ledges, pyramid, and funbox. The park is considered a low-impact park, a catch phrase for public skateparks in the 1990s, so if you are looking for very technically advanced terrain, you may be disappointed. But it's this mellow nature that makes it ideal for longboarding.
At first, the large bowl seems almost too big. If you try to work it like a smaller bowl, you'll find that you lose too much speed on the transition between the two halfs of the bowl. You're better off carving or kickturning each half of the bowl twice to maintain speed, before attacking the other half.
What makes the park absolutely awesome on a longboard, however, is the street area. The park is set on a hill and this allows you build up and maintain a lot of speed as you carve through the numerous lines available to you. The street area also boasts the park's only real vertical A ledge about twenty feet long gives one of the banks about a foot of vertical wall.
There is a nominal fee to skate, and it is a supervised facility, so bring a helmet and full pads or be prepared to rent them. If you don't have a helmet, buy an inexpensive bike helmet. The ones they rent are real dorky looking. There are day and evening sessions, seven day a week. The park is located on 42659 Margarita Road, Temecula. To get there (from San Diego), take Highway 15 North and get off at the first Temecula exit, Highway 79. It's about 2 miles north of the Immigration Checkpoint. Take 79 east about a mile to Margarita Road. There's an AM/PM Minimarket on the corner. Turn left on Margarita and go about another mile until you get to a large park on the left. The skatepark is in the park next to the roller hockey rink.
For more information, contact Jeff Lawrence, (909) 694-6410, at the Temecula recreation department or check out their web page: http://www.ci.temecula.ca.us/recreate/parks/index.html.