The Hunting Times

 I picked up Krueger at 0600 Saturday morning and we drove down to Carmel to ride Town Run.  John King, a fellow Eagle Scout, drove up from Seymour to ride with us.  We cranked out a 4-mile "warm up" and then headed over to Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park to ride there. Our ride at Town Run - a nice "easy" flowing trail that's pretty short but fun. You can see from the 39ft (12 m) elevation change, it's also pretty flat. The two trails we hit at Ft. Ben: the left side first and then the right loop. The little appendix sticking out at the top of the map is where we parked the truck. Go to the bottom of the map, left side.  Look at the "i" in 8.5 mi and go up to see that little 180-degree turn that crosses the creek.  That spot right there?  That's where I crashed hard enough to set off my Apple Watch.  It detected that I had fallen and was calling 911 for me.  I cancelled that call as I was fine.  Well, at least fine enough that I did not re...

 It's a little later in the season for us - we usually grind our deer in late Feb or early March.  Why'd we wait so long?  Schedules I guess.  Spring Break.  No real reason.  Glad we did though as we had a beautiful day and even got to open the garage doors to let in some fresh air. Me, Alex, Eric and Davey drove down to Rob's with 250# of meat to grind.  We left at 6 am and arrived at 7:30.  Rob had breakfast of biscuits & gravy with hashbrowns ready for us.  After which, we retired to the garage to get to work. We ground 80% deer with 20% pork (by weight) with seasonings.  Why the pork?  To get some fat into the mix.  Venison is so lean that you will burn it when cooking or it won't coagulate and thus, pork is needed.  Alex & Eric ground the mix with the coarse head in the grinder.  Then they added water to thin the mixture and ground it again with the fine head in the grinder.  The final product looked...

Krueger and I headed out early on Saturday, 03 APR.  Well, actually we headed out a little later than we wanted to because I was an idiot and set my alarm wrong.  Anyway, at 6:30 am we headed W to ride Kickapoo in Danville, IL.  And not only did I delay us, but then we ran into road construction that sent us on a detour along the way. We finally arrived at Kickapoo about 8 am Indiana time, or 7 am Illinois time.  And we promptly found that the park was closed.  It was turkey hunting season in IL and the park was set aside for hunting until 1 pm.  Cool.  We have no issues with that, only wish we knew that before driving 90 minutes.  While we debated our next action, we watched the largest tom turkey I have ever seen walk across the highway toward the park.  As we gawked and exclaimed our amazement, the turkey took notice, turned around, and got out of Dodge post haste.  We took solace in knowing that maybe since the turkey hunters ruined ...