My dad mentioned something on Saturday about anybody who wanted an @hedrick.org e-mail to just let me know. That offer still stands. Probably the easiest is if you want one, just e-mail me your current address and I’ll set it up so that anything sent here will automatically get forwarded to your current mailbox.

Don’t be strangers! Many of you come to Austin and central Texas. Look me up or drop me an e-mail.

Saturday, my dad and grandfather and I got up early and headed out to some land behind their place that we’ve got permission to hunt on. Some others were hunting around the stock tank we normally occupy so we set up around another nearby. I guess by about 8:00 or so that morning, the birds started to fly. Most of them were white-wing dove coming out from roosting in the city overnight and I had quickly limited out on my two ww. I was going to have to keep a close eye on the flyers so as to not drop any more ww that morning, which was difficult because of the angle I was at on the stock tank — they were mostly flying directly over some brush/trees on the far side of the tank about 40 yards away or so and then breaking to my right across a fenceline. If I shot too early, they’d drop into the tank and too late, they’d drop on property I couldn’t get too because of the terrain. I did manage to bag four other mourning dove before we headed back to the house for coffee and breakfast.

That afternoon, Hays expressed a serious interest in going out with us. I hadn’t really expected it at all. My dad brought my old .410 break-over and we had some shells for it, so we let him come with us. Of course, if you’ve ever been hunting with kids who haven’t been out much, you know that you’re not so much hunting as mentoring and tutoring them. We set up in a treeline under some low overhanging cedar with the sun at our backs. After showing Hays how the .410 worked and giving him a quick rundown of the “this gun can kill things, don’t point it at stuff you don’t want to die” speech we were set up. A little while later a couple dove came in from the far right (away) moving to cross in front of us and pass about 20 yards over our left shoulders. Hays cocked and raised the gun and took aim and fired. He didn’t bring any bird down, but the shot was certainly close because of the reaction of the bird. I don’t think he’d pulled the gun in tight against his shoulder as the next few minutes were him overreacting to how it kicked and frogged his bicep. He quickly figured out that drawing the butt of the gun into the shoulder keeps it from doing that!

A couple more birds did fly in that afternoon, but very few. At one point I did drop a bird out at about 30-40 yards and was having a helluva time finding it in the thigh-high scrub that was pretty green from this Summer’s rains. Then Hays, with his eagle-eyes managed to walk right out to it and say, “Well, duh, dad! Here it is.” Thanks to him, I did manage to bring the one dove I shot that afternoon back to the house.

The next morning (Sunday, September 2) we went out again and set up around the tank we had originally wanted to get around. The birds just weren’t flying, so after maybe a half-hour or so, Hays and I headed out across a big patch of sunflowers and set up in a treeline waiting for the birds to fly in to feed. None ever came. I think we might have seen a grand total of a dozen birds on Sunday morning. It was pretty disappointing, but I had a lot of fun nonetheless, since I was out with my grandpa, dad, and my son.

I had a lot of fun, and so did Hays. He’s enjoyed telling his friends at school that he got to go hunting and on Monday (Labor Day) we stopped in at Cabela’s and he got to look at some different shotguns, including a nice 870 Wingmaster Youth Model. It was still just a little big for him, but they make an even smaller one with a barrel just shy of 19". I might try to find a shop around town that has one in stock to see how it handles for him. I think it’s time to track down a good hunter’s safety course to get both him and Griffin into. Even though she doesn’t want to do any hunting, she’s still interested in shooting skeet and clays with us whenever we do. I’m looking forward to that and even Meredith has expressed a strong interest in getting involved. Not that she’s ever been opposed to it, she’s just not as gung-ho about the whole thing as I am, I guess. Anyway, there’s still quite a bit of dove season left, so I certainly hope we get to go out at least a couple more times. Otherwise the seven birds I’ve brought down this year are going to amortize out to about $20 each!

Oh, but back to our story — we were going to be on the lake in a boat, so I thought we’d do the same thing — set a waypoint at the dock where we got on the boat. Then we could tool all over the lake for the day and not have to worry about keeping track of landmarks (yes, I’m fully aware that a GPS is not a replacement for quality orienteering; we’re on vacation — NOT hiking the Andes).

Except that as we drove through Marble Falls on our way to the cabin, the display on my GPS went all wonky. Well, Meredith did not want to go on the lake without the GPS, and I’ve been itching for a new one ever since my dad got the top-of-the-line Garmin eTrex a few months ago. It does maps and jacks into the ‘puter and all that jazz. So, yeah, I picked up a new GPS at the local Mart of Walton (Sam, that is). It’s a Magellan eXplorist 210 and it does maps and connects to the PC.

Flash forward to today (oh, in case you’re wondering it did a yeoman’s job of navigating on the lake)….

I did a little poking around at geocaching.com and found about a dozen caches near our house. I even downloaded a file with all of them as waypoints. Then I had to figure out how to get them onto the GPS; I really didn’t want to have to enter them all by hand. I remember how well that went over a few years ago, when I got my first GPS. I spent several hours hand-entering several geocache waypoints into the GPS and then went out to find the caches, but didn’t actually find any because by that time it was dusk and I was a complete newbie to the whole ordeal. Talk about off-putting!

Anyway, I plugged the eXplorist’s USB cable into my Mac and lo-and-behold, the damn thing mounted as an external disk. I was able to see all the waypoints, tracks, routes, and et-cetera. VERY COOL! At that point, I just needed to figure out how to convert the geocaching.com waypoint file format (.loc) into a Magellan waypoint format (.upt). A quick Google search later, and I have Chimbisimo to thank for pointing me to GPSBabel! What an awesome tool it is! It instantly converted the .loc to a .upt and I was able to drop it right onto the eXplorist!

So, to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), Hays and Griffin and I went geocaching this afternoon. We hit nine spots; found four; didn’t find four; and had one inconclusive. These designations are all from the geocaching.com website.

Our four finds:
GCZH8V – Our very first geocache find, ever! Woohoo!
GCJXA8
GCP8KE
GCWP7P

The four we didn’t locate:
GCWP6Q
GCWP69
GCNA12
GCWP75

The inconclusive one was GCXPNG, where we did find a non-permanent chewing gum box, but it was empty, so I added a short note to it and put it back where we found it (under cover, no the green one).

I downloaded the track log from my GPS and then ran it through GPSBabel again to generate a Google Earth kml file. I then loaded that into Google Earth and massaged it a little and cleaned things up and organized them a bit. If you’d like, you can download a KMZ file of our trek. It should load directly into Google Earth (I tested it on Meredith’s computer, and it worked fine).

I think maybe next weekend we’ll go hunting for GCRK4C, GCW71A, GCW970, and GCWP82.

More photos are at Flickr.

We’re at Lake Buchanan for a few days. Today we rented a nice, giant pontoon boat. Here, I demonstrate the proper use of the swim ladder.

Fortunately, only my pride was hurt.

Well, we’re home. We left Forest City, Arkansas, this morning at 7 am. Two days of 10+ hours of driving. I wouldn’t mind driving longer, but then we tend to sleep late overnight and get on the road late.

All told, we put 2,753 miles on Meredith’s Forester — We started in Texas, and drove through Oklahoma and Missouri and Illinois before getting to Middleton, Wisconsin. Then we spent a day and a half in Minnesota, then back to Wisconsin. When we left Middleton, we spent two days in Chicago, Illinois, then drove from the northern tip of Illinois, to the southern tip; then through Missouri and spent the night in Arkansas. When we left Arkansas, we had driven from it’s NE edge to it’s SW edge.

We’re finally home, though. Yay.

I’ll post pictures and perhaps some sort of travelogue once I’ve gotten everything organized.