big weekend

Saturday
I got up early and packed up some gear: pistol bag, cooler, water, gatorade, extra socks and T-shirt & some other odds and ends.

First off I had to get a pair of new tires for the truck as the old rear tires were getting more than a few age lines. I was on site when they opened for business at 8am and was 3rd in line. I was a bit disappointed with the time I lost filling out paperwork, and the fact the guy who got my truck couldn’t work the door lock. But the actual changing of the tires didn’t take very long, and I was back in the saddle before too long.

After tires, I met up with one of the local Search & Rescue teams for a few hours of tramping around in the brush with several varieties of man's best friend, looking for lost volunteers and fuzzy yellow tennis balls. It was my first visit with this particular group and they were pretty friendly. After a couple trips down, around and through the brush, we stood in the shade, rehydrated and chatted about how dogs get trained, how non profit groups are organized, gear, first aid and other fun stuff.

When it got too hot training was over I headed north to meet up with a couple buddies who have been wanting me to visit their local pistol range. Having buddies with similar hobbies is cool. Having buddies who share their ammo is even cooler. We took time out for some lunch, smothered and chunked for me, then packed up the buddy gear and headed out to the sticks for some target practice. Nice spot really, shady, great big fans moving the air around, not crowded at all. I figured Saturday afternoon would be busy but we were the only shooters on site. We fired my .45, buddy #1's .45, buddy #2's glock 9mm, with a few test rounds through buddy #1's .22 rifle and my 9mm beretta.

After we had killed off the evil paper horde and created a sizeable dent in buddy's stockpile of .45 rounds, we packed up the gear, visited with the nice lady at the counter a bit, examined the most recent crop of kittens under the porch and headed back to civilization for a weapons cleaning frenzy. There was some unhappiness when my bottle of Hoppes leaked in the gun bag, but no major harm done. There was much discussion of random topics, including: how slowly I shoot, the cute friendly waitress at the waffle house, whether or not one should clean a glock or watch movies with one's girlfriend (buddy #2 chose movies) and should Texas repave some of the goat paths they call roads.

All in all, a pretty good day.

Sunday
The original plan called for a trip to the Johnson Co. Shooting Sports Assoc IDSA match but I was wiped out and slept in instead.

I did get out of bed in time to meet up with buddy #1 for a cheeseburger before we packed up for a training session with another Search and Rescue group. We don’t have trailing dogs in training so after a couple runs we sat around the base camp chatting about policy, procedure, maps, gear, upcoming scheduled events and training. I’m new to the S&R world so they were trying to learn about me and I was trying to learn about them.

Another good day

I spent most of Monday sitting around the house, napping and drinking water. I’m not used to putting that many miles on my boots over the weekend like that, so I needed some recovery time.