4th of July

Once again, my fourth of July returns to Wade's cabin. Its been a few years since I've been there for the 4th - I spent the last few in Traverse City, Michigan, Washington DC and Houston. It was damn good to be back! Erik, you were missed immensely.

A few months ago, at the annual Twin Cities boat show, Bruce (Wade's dad) bought the best toy ever, the Wego Kite Tube. One of Bruce's favorite activities other than hunting and fishing is to drive Wade and I (or anyone else) around the lake on water skis, wakeboards, tubes, or any other towable object. This is by far the stupidest and most entertaining of devices. We tried it out last weekend a little, but with little success. This weekend, with a little help from some good wind, we got flying!

It is both fun and scary. As a rider, you have slight control over weather or not you take off, maintain balance, and land. You are truly at the mercy of the driver and the wind. The skull and crossbone logo of the kite tube sum it up well. We had some pretty rad flights and crashes. The video is exemplory, but we had higher and longer flights as well as bigger crashes. I took a good tumble from ~15ft or so, the result is a plan to install a nut cup into my board shorts.

Aside from kite tubing until exhaustion, we got some good redneck fun in. On Monday, we did some clay pigeon shooting. I was really craving a good shooting session. I shot pretty well considering I haven't shot in years. We also got some good fireworks, some sunflower/plane style spinnters as well as the morter shell style. Its always more fun to shoot them yourself than see a show. In addition to all that, I read a few hundred pages of "You Shall Know Our Velocity," by Dave Eggars. I really like the book so far (thanks Robin).

The weekend was pretty sweet all around. Good fishing, good food, good company, good entertainment. Its hard work playing that hard!