Day Two
Trip Start
Feb 01, 2008
1
2
3
Trip End
Feb 03, 2008
Las Vegas, Nevada
Saturday, February 2, 2008
The competition was a series of different types of shooting positions, distances, fixed and variable range targets, movers, hostages, speed drills, etc. It was the funnest shooting match I have ever attended. The guys putting it on really knew how to have a good time while getting people to push themselves beyond what they are probably used to shooting at their home ranges. I had done just about all of those types of shooting minus some the game of "pool" but it had been a long time so I was winging it a lot of the time. Having never fired the gun I was using I didn't exactly know what settings to dial in on the scope. I had two ranges that I knew were dead on and just swagged when it was closer or farther from them. All things considered I didn't do too bad. I took 26th out of 30 which made me feel good considering all of those guys were using fairly high end rifles almost all of which were custom built and they were familiar with them since they owned them. Oh did I mention that it was freezing and me thinking the desert would be warmer than Denver didn't bring anything warm. I was wearing a tshirt and thin water repellent bike jacket because I heard it was 50 and raining when I checked the forecast so my hands were purple most of the time which didn't help the situation any. Next time I'll just go ahead and lug the jacket on the airplane.
When I got back a couple of the other guys had arrived. After thawing out in the shower and putting on some clean clothes we headed to the strip again. We had drinks, told old "war" stories, laughed and in general offended everyone around us and had a bite to eat before the big event. We attended the UFC title fight that night. The tickets were a ridiculous $200 in the nose bleed section but since that's what everyone wanted to do I went along with it. Most of the fights were actually pretty good. I had never watched one in person and having studied various forms of martial arts it was interesting to see how I could predict what the guy should are is going to do before he did it. Kind of made me want to get back into it just for fun. Needless to say, you get a bunch of rowdy jarheads together watching a fight and drinking like there's no tomorrow and you're bound for some entertainment (not me of course). One of the guys decided he would single handedly tell the fighters what they needed to be doing so he was standing up yelling all sorts of things at them. He had the entire section around us cracking up laughing. I just pretended not to know him. ;-)
After coming out of the fight we met up with another guy who had shown up later and we all went and had drinks and caught up some more. It's funny how everyone remembers certain details and remembers different people which help to complete the bigger picture and bring back memories that were thought to be lost in the depths of our brains. We all had a good time seeing everyone. The group then split up and went in different directions. Having been riled up from the fighting and drinking Len wanted to hit the town. We wandered around from casino to casino until we finally found Dick's which served fruity frozen drinks in 24" tall glasses, just what we were looking for. Len about got us kicked out because he decided to be funny and slide up next to a girl at the next table but clumsily knocked over her beer and got the attention of the hostess and managers. After the waitress replaced her drink and made him sit out of arms reach the manager just stood behind him to keep and eye out but we were allowed to stay. We decided it was time to move on and get some grub. I led the scrappy gang to a pizza stand and we had a bite to eat because the other guys were a bunch of light weights and were having trouble at this point. We grabed some grub and then decided to walk it off and head back to the hotels. I had to keep stopping and wait for the zig zagging gaggle to catch up. It was really quite amuzing to watch but they made it back to their hotels and we called it a night.
