Americans, Brits skateboard from LA to NYC for Netflix doc

Rupert Rixon will never forget seeing boats “floating” in the desert.

The filmmaker was skateboarding in California’s Mojave Desert, where summer temperatures regularly rise about 100°F.

“I had terrible hallucinations,” he told The Post. “Even after drinking 14 liters of water a day, the heat was brutal. I would be skating and think the road was water and cars were boats as they were passing by.

“You see these kinds of mirages in films and think it’s bollocks, but it’s very real. The road literally looked like water.”

It’s just one of the wild experiences he had while skateboarding across America to raise money for the UK’s Teenage Cancer Trust. “I’ve had quite a few family members suffer with cancer but think it’s generally something that sadly reaches most people one way or another,” he said.

His 2015 journey — accompanied by three English friends and three American strangers he discovered on a blog and invited to join the group of amateur skaters — has now been turned into “Longboarding LA to NY,” a Netflix documentary currently available in the UK.

It took three months to skate from Los Angeles to New York City, spending days on the board and nights in a van.

The calamities started even before they got to LA.

He said, “I had no real experience skating before. I always wanted to growing up, but was awful!”

Unlike advanced mountain climbers who spend years — sometimes decades — before they even consider approaching Mount Everest, Rixon dove headfirst into the physically grueling challenge with no training.

“I had the objective to do it before I could even really skate,” he admitted. “I just really loved how it looked. Longboarding is cool when the skaters are just flying down mountains at ridiculous speeds. I thought, ‘I want to learn to do this.’”

So he practiced in skateparks beforehand to get the feel of maneuvering a longboard, but it wasn’t always smooth skating. Several months before the trip, Rixon had a bad fall “I wasn’t wearing a helmet when I fell off the board and smashed my head on concrete,” he said. The result? Nearly two days of short-term memory loss.

“I don’t even think I’ve fully recovered even though my brain scans came back normal.” Rixon said. Even seven years later, the 27-year-old from East London sometimes struggles to remember the names of people he’s known his whole life.

Horrendous accidents occurred during the trip, too. One of the Americans took his board for a spin on a California freeway at night and took a nasty spill.

“He picked up too much speed, slipped off the board, which went flying into traffic and got crushed, and he suffered terrible scrapes,” Rixon said. The skater wasn’t wearing a T-shirt or a helmet, resulting in severe injuries that “were gushing blood,” on his back, elbows, knees and arms.

Still, it didn’t delay the journey. “He just washed his wounds and rested in the van for a few weeks until he recovered,” said Rixon, who runs the production company Perspective Pictures,

Though Rixon admits, “we hadn’t properly planned this trip,” it was more intense than some of the people who joined had anticipated. One of the guys even turned back on the fifth day.

“I think he just didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be,” Rixon said. “We went straight into a really tough environment,” which included extreme heat and hilly roads. 

Now, nearly a decade after his journey across the US, Rixon is still skating, but “mostly just to get around London,” he said.

“By the end of the trip I suppose I just felt an immense sense of relief that we’d made it to New York with enough time to make our flight back to the UK and that we’d not been seriously injured,” Rixon said. “It’s hard to say beyond that how I felt when it was over — because although it’s had a profound effect on me, it’s honestly hard to put it into words.”