The Missouri trip was a lot more draining and tiring than I’d expected. The nine days I was there taught me a lot about quite a few things… And overall, I think I am a better person (and photographer) because of the trip.
So what have I learned from this trip?
1. Midwest Chinese food sucks no matter how much the locals rave about it — it ain’t Chinese… It’s… Frankenstein Americanese food…
2. People who are serious about guns and treating them as sporting equipment make tremendous financial, emotional and physical investments in the sport.
3. Action pistol is an expensive sport — each round of bullet costs $0.30 (more if custom made). And on an average practice shooting session, one can go through 700 to 1,000 rounds — that’s each day times almost seven days a week.
4. Based on what I gathered, action pistol sport is 10% skills and 90% mental, just like many competitive sports. They say you can only learned so much on the skills, and the rest is all in the mind.
5. Most shooters I met are great people — not the “red neck” image I’d stereotyped them as. But that changed when I heard the speech from the president of NRA on the last night of the event. He made a few comments about NRA, guns and politics that made me shake my head a few times even among a room full of gun owners…
6. Missouri does have a NPR station. But I guess it doesn’t get enough funding to have all the good stuff that other big cities enjoy. Instead, it plays classical music most of the time for which I mistakenly wrote it off entirely as a NPR-less state.
7. Driving on gravels can feel like driving on ice sometimes — when it skids, the car may or may not stop…
8. There’s a place for big gas goessling American trucks, and that place is called the American Midwest. And I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or negative way. When my client wasn’t practicing shooting, I took some time off to drive around “the woods” in the more rural areas of Missouri. And I soon realized those were no place for luxury gas-friendly Toyotas or Lexuses… Those were some rough roads with car-unfriendly conditions. And by being big, cheap(er) and possibly more capable of standing up to abuse, American trucks would fare well there. And indeed 90% of trucks I saw there were American — and they are huge and mighty.
9. For whatever reason, gas prices in Missouri was just as expensive as California.
10. Australians have far superior gun control laws than those in the United States. Americans could learn a few things from the Australians on gun control.
I enjoyed the trip, enjoyed seeing more nature, and enjoyed the learning experience. I look forward to processing 3,500+ images I shot there in the coming days…