Time to spare, go by air and by the way, watch out for those quail hunters!

If you've ever traveled in a small plane, you know there is truth in the old adage "time to spare, go by air." Such was the case over the weekend. My lovely and talented bride and I had planned to fly to Western Kentucky to take my mother to lunch for her birthday which was Sunday. The weather looked a little iffy Saturday but looked like it might be improving Sunday. We left Sunday morning and let me just say, the weather forecasters were a tad bit off on the conditions. We landed at the airport designated 5KY2, a private airstrip my brothers and I created across the road from where my Mom lives. We jokingly refer to it as "Larkins' International." We had dodged snowshowers all the way up there and I was glad to be on the ground. The forecast called for the weather to improve and we had about five hours before we planned to depart for Memphis. You know about weather in the MidSouth. If you don't like what you see, wait a few hours and it will change. It didn't. By 4:30, we were back at my mother's house and the weather wasn't improving. As pilot in command, it was my choice: take off in weather that the plane was not supposed to fly in and attempt to get home in about an hour or drive the three hours back to Memphis and return the next day to pick up the plane. I didn't want this flight to end up as some headline in the paper or in the news on TV or radio. We drove home. Another adage: "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air, wishing you were on the ground."
When we walked in the house, I had a message on the answering machine from a former co-worker from down on the river. He works at one of the 24 hour news operations and was wanting some clarification on quail hunting since I used to do that Outdoor show thing down on the river. It seems the Veep had tagged somebody with a 28 guage shotgun while quail hunting in Texas. Hey, it can be an easy thing to do if you aren't aware of where everyone else is in the field, even if everyone is wearing blaze orange. I wasn't aware of the story until DJ's call and then I had to look it up on the internet. One quote in the story was rather interesting. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by God, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good. "
Unfortunately, the person who was shot was in intensive care as of this writing. I hope he pulls through. At 30 yards, which is well within the killing range of birdshot when hunting quail, the human victim should consider himself lucky.