Today was a man day

I'll carry on with the Ray-Nagin bashing soon enough. For those of you who want to read that, scroll down because there's plenty. But I took a break from it today because it was one of those days when it felt good to be a man and do manly things.





I started off with a trip out to the airport, where I rented this nice plane.







Everything checked out nicely during pre-flight so off I went.












Look--it's Lagniappe's Lair! You can almost make out Lagniappe through the window. He'd better not be on my couch!










If you click on the pictures, they will get bigger.


I overflew Harpers Ferry for a bit. You're looking at three different states here. The town in in West Virginia. Across the river to the north (left in this pic) is Maryland, and down the Potomac River, the land on the south (right) side of that far bridge is Virginia.




Here's where the Shenandoah River comes into the Potomac. Note the pilings of the old bridge, washed out decades ago by floodwaters. The rivers and their periodic floods have practically erased the Harpers Ferry that Thomas Jefferson, Merriwether Lewis, Robert E. Lee and John Brown knew.




To the right of the river you can make out the old C&O Canal and it's towpath. It's dry now, but it used to carry commerce 184 miles from Cumberland, MD all the way into Washington, DC. The towpath still goes the entire way and it's a great hiking/biking trail.





After this, I flew out to Hancock, Maryland and shot some touch-and-go landings on their runway. Then I took the plane back to Martinsburg called it a day from flying.

From there I went to my gun club for a bit of shooting. Men fly and men shoot. And this was a man day.

I shot this nifty FAL that I built from spare pieces and parts a couple of weeks ago. Took a bit of fiddling with the gas tube assembly to get it shooting, and a bit more flddling with the front sight post to get it shooting where it was aimed, but it's dead-on now. I know...it looks like hell. But now that I know it shoots, I'll pull it back apart and re-finish the whole thing so it's all a nice new parkerized gray. I'll probably replace the plastic stock and handguards with some nice walnut too. Real men shoot guns made with wood.


And since I wanted to shoot some more, I broke out the CZ-85 and the H&K P7M13 and thoroughly killed a few more paper targets. These two guns are both 9mm. Normally I'm not a fan of 9mm. I know that European police and military forces have used it for close to a century now, and it's a good cartridge if you're only shooting Europeans, but for defense against American bad guys, the .45 is still king. When you hit someone with a .45, they stay hit. But I didn't have a .45 today. I had these guns. And I like them enough that I don't mind that they're only 9mm.


After that, since I was done flying and shooting for the day, I stopped off at the local bar and had a manly burger and a few beers, served to me by some seriously fine specimens of womanhood wearing tight shorts and even tighter t-shirts. Alas I could not take photographs in there so you readers will have to use your imaginations, but I can tell you that looking at them was worth every penny of the extra few bucks added to the price of the drinks.

All in all, it was a good day to be a man and do manly things.


And Lagniappe says that it was a good day to play basketball. We did some of that, too