Ay yai yai where was I.

Ok so we head out of the Minneapolis airport back to my friend’s house. Past the Mall of America. Saw it when we were landing too, from the air. It’s massive, but at the same time, at least from the air, looks like it’s not that big. From the ground though it’s a freaking monster. I’ve been to Minneapolis 4 times, and driven past the Mall of America each time (it’s right by the airport after all) and I’ve never been there. I suppose next time I should go, just to go see it.

It’s late though by this point; must have been after 9pm local time, and so we headed straight back. Before we even unloaded the truck we had beer’s in our hands, and were smoking more. I knew my lungs would not be well after the end of the weekend, but it’s a once a year type thing, so I was having fun. We shot the shit a bit with my friends, and his wife, checked out my new gun, got our gear inside for the night, and cooked up some pizzas in the oven. Pretty soon we were watching my MN friend greasing up his Uplands gear with waterproofing gunk, and talking about how you can make it from scratch, etc, while eating pizza, drinking beer, and admiring his brother’s DVD collection.

(His brother was already up hunting, and lives in his brother’s basement in the apartment down there. He travels alot for work, and such, so he just has this little bachelor pad in the basement.)

Soon enough we were calling it, and I let my Boston friend have the bed, and I crashed on the couch, and put on Sky High, a movie about superhero kids going to a superhero high school….but not X-Men. All happy and disneyfied. Boston watched it for awhile, we laughed, then he hit the sack, and I fast forwarded through the rest of the movie, and then conked out.

Woke up to find Boston standing over me in his hunting gear.

“it’s 5am. I think he’s awake upstairs.”

to which I’m saying “Yeah ok so go up and see.”

finally I get up, go upstairs. Nothing. At least it seems like everyone is still asleep. I say that I bet he slept in upstairs (He was saying we’d get up at 4am to get hunting early and now we were looking at more like 5:30. I started getting dressed anyway. No point going back to sleep and soon enough my friend, in a full length robe, comes downstairs with a cup of coffee laughing about how he overslept and turned his alarm off. We gear up, pack up, load up the truck, pour some coffee and are hitting the road by shortly after 6am. Before we leave though we got to visit briefly with my friend’s three daughters who woke up. He has a 5 year old and Twin 4 year old girls. That’s gonna be fun in a few years. The 5 year old drove up hunting with me the previous year. I drove his truck with her, and my friend drove his mini-van, with the twins. It was a fun trip and she kept good company (when she wasn’t sleeping).

I also went trick or treating with her that year as well. I flew up last year ON halloween and missed my kids trick or treating, and ended up taking her around. She was aggressive in hitting houses, and she got pretty far from her parents, so I kept up with her. About a half hour later I got a call from my friend “hey where are you? have you seen my daughter?” to which I assured him we were both still alive and raking in the candy.

Anyway so we were off…and stopping within 5 minutes at the gas station to gas up before the highway. We were looking at more like 6:30 at this point, and were getting worried about rush hour traffic, but he remembered he had a coupon for gas and wanted to use it. So we hop in to buy some breakfast more coffee and cigarettes while he gasses up. Inside, at 6:30 am was a girl who worked there with samples of their breakfast sandwiches. You know like the guys at the chinese fast food places in a mall food court who press the chicken on toothpicks in your face. It looked hideous. Solid yellow cake egg in a tortilla. i told her that the food scared me and she laughed. I ended up getting a donut, a large coffee, and another pack of cigarettes.

For some reason I thought a single pack purchased at the Pittsburgh airport would last me a while, but I was already low. My poor lungs.

We hit the highway and my friend swears. He forgot to use his coupon. We manage to zip through Minneapolis without it being too bad, and we were off to Wisconsin.

The drive up was three and a half hours which consisted mainly of us talking about the health care/insurance crisis in the country, the economic crisis, and whether my Boston friend was gonna man up and propose to his girlfriend, which ended up being a recurring theme for the weekend. You know it’s bad when your guy friends are like “Dude you’re NEVER going to do better than this girl, you better marry her you schmuck.”

We stopped at the best type of store in the world on the way up. Bait, Tackle, Hunting, and Beer, to purchase some 20 gauge ammo for myself, and a hunting vest for my Boston friend. I got the ammo but their vests were sparse, and they told us about an outlet up the road that we went to, so he could get a better orange vest. After that, another half hour and we were in lovely Clam Lake, pulling in around 10am.

My friend’s brother was in the cabin of their family up there (they live up there and run a business, and he was staying there, but we would soon check into the lodge down the road where we woudl cause much mayhem) and he had a lazy morning and hadn’t gone out hunting yet. He is the best shot of all of us, and it was troubling the news he had…

Both my friend and his brother had hunted the previous weekend, and then his brother came back up on The Tuesday to keep hunting. That’s 6 man days of hunting combined, and they had zero birds. This was highly unusual. He didn’t normally get skunked on a single day, much less over the course of almost a week. It pretty much was a fair indication of what would be the weekend though, unfortunately.

we loaded up the truck with the clay trap of his uncle, and we headed out to a spot where we could get some warmup shooting in. If the birds were light we’d need to be warmed up, and my Boston friend hadn’t shot since he was young. We each did about a box worth of clays, and I was even hitting them by the end.

See I’m disabled when it comes to shooting. I’m a left eye dominant, right handed shooter. Most people are right eyed, right handed, or left eye, left handed….only very rarely is someone different for hand and eye. Yay me! I’m special!  Basically what this amounts to is that my mind tries to line up my shot with my right eye, but because my left eye is dominant I’m always going to be off. So I have to close my left eye when I shoot to be accurate (or learn to shoot left handed). I’m getting better at it, but it’s definitely unnatural for me, and I’ll never be a great shot because of it. I don’t need to be great though, just competent.

The dogs went nuts though. We kept them in the cars and they were hooting and hollering and dying to get out hearing the guns going off, thinking we were getting birds. Turns out the brother’s dog had a cut on his nose and was up in the front of the car going crazy, and the blood went everywhere, and now the roof of his liberty has small little maroon scuff stains all over it from the dog’s nose. Like a hundred of em. He’ll need to get that detailed.

So having the practice, we buttoned up. The snow was starting to lightly fall and fly through the air. I hopped in the Liberty with the brother, and the other two guys in the truck. Wished each other luck and headed out…

which I’ll talk about in part 3…