About a week ago, I got an e-mail from a friend from TBoF (Traditional Bowhunters of Florida) about doing maintenance and repairing archery equipment at Camp Boggy Creek in Eustis, FL, 100ish miles from me. If there's anything I have a hard time resisting, it's playing with traditional bows and learning how to repair and maintain them. So I go to Camp Boggy Creek and after braving the terrors of road construction and scary tourist buses filled with what looks like Oakland, CA (or Richmond or the crappy parts of LA or any number of these hell-holes called big cities), I finally arrive at the camp, which is a camp for kids and teenagers with serious (and possibly fatal) illnesses. It's a neat camp that lets otherwise indoor potatoes have a chance to enjoy the wilderness. Anyway, some of my friends from TBoF are tinkering with their own high-end custom-made bows. There's a pretty neat-looking take-down longbow that happens to be made by Four Winds Archery. The bowyer for Four Winds Archery, by the way, is local to me -- he lives in Silver Springs, FL, which is just east of Ocala, FL. I don't blame my friend, an ogre of an Englishman transplanted in Florida, for insisting that he would never part with the bow. It shoots and aims well, but whew, it's got a bit of a vibration and really likes my arm! I also tried a few other custom-made bows, but even if they do aim a bit more easily than my little Chek-Mate, they still give me a bit of vibration that travels up to my funny bone, which isn't quite so funny anymore.
The real fun, besides playing with bows and repairing them in the wilderness, was talking about the local ecology, especially the plants. One of my friends did have to remind me that I was no longer under a certain professor's reign of terror when I was running around trying to identify all these trees. I think some of these trees have been permanently burned into my mind. I have a strong feeling that a future story may have various scientific names embedded into character names and locations.
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