Calling Shotgun

When most people call shotgun on a roadtrip they normally are saying they want to sit up front in the car. Well, on night one of the road trip, somewhere between drinks at the crazy Cactus and shotgunning beers in the fountain at the Bessborough hotel, Sandy and Watson decided it would be a good idea to buy an actual shotgun for the trip home. Now, normal people would probably have laughed and said, "yeah, great idea!", and would quickly forget it. Not us, we went to three different stores in the morning looking for the right gun before we found a store that sold the right shotgun and trap shooting device.

So, the usual mind-numbingly boring drive from Saskatoon to Calgary took on a whole new edge. As soon as we left the city limits we started looking for a place to start shooting our huge box of clay pigeons. We realized that a shotgun makes a fairly large amount of noise and on the flat prairie the sound could carry a long way. Normally on the drive from Saskatoon to Calgary all that you can see in any direction are empty fields. Now that we were actually looking for an empty field all we could see were farm houses in everywhere. Finally, after about an hour of debating, we pulled off the highway and drove for a couple of minutes up a grid road. We ran into a farmer who was mowing his lawn. Sandy bravely jumped out of the car and asked if he would mind if we took some shots in his field. The farmer seemed totally unfazed that three guys in an Audi would ask to shoot a shotgun in his field and gave us permission to shoot. He even gave us some pointers for launching the clay pigeons (always launch them into the wind, who knew?)

Shooting is fun.



I was by far the worst shot of the three but by the end of the second session we were all hitting every target. We started to launch two at a time and then launching them at different angles and speeds. All those of years of playing Nintendo's Duck Hunt had finally paid off.