Fresh Clothes and Old Friends

Its been some time since my last post but BOY do we have some stories to share! We left Davenport on late Thursday night and went over to LeClair, Iowa to visit the Antique Archaeology store which was cool.. its more a of merchandise store than i imagined, alot of coffee mugs and hats at outrageous prices so we admired the little shop of goods and skipped town for Illinois! We arrived at a very isolated camp in the middle of Chandlerville which had lots of adventures in store for us. We found bats, caught fish, filmed deer, called to owls, played

 with bugs, and defended the camp from raccoons! We caught all kinds of fish, alligator gar and its obvious why you call them alligator gar but a wild fish to catch, very tough! Then lots more carp and some catfish too but we honestly didn't have fishing line strong enough for this cat fish, And had one right on his line close to shore and the thing whipped around once and snapped his line so we were a little unprepared for those size fish but we made 3 days of fishing out of the area! It  down-poored on us once and wouldn't you know it when we biked back to camp in the storm, not 3 minutes after we got indoors was the storm done. We dried off and headed back out to the fishing spot though, dry and waterproof for the next storm! We saw tons of deer and we even had an encounter with some coyotes and deer! The coyotes pushed the deer onto us when we were on the end of a bank fishing and when i came up to the top of the bank i was looking at five or six deer who were springing toward us but took off across the river and the rest through some woods. Andrew and I chased down the coyotes after with the Big Boy Buggy we had generously been loaned for the duration of that trip! (The buggy was returned in the same shape it was borrowed by the way Mike, seriously thanks for everything you offered!) Night after night in these woods was a whole other world, owls calling like crazy, me and Andrew have nailed the owl call. The last night we upset the order of the owls by calling too close to a nest and we heard the owls call back to us with a fierce coot! That night we had 3 owls and myself calling, it sounded like the woods came alive once we called near that nest 50 ft from us and all the owls in it went screeching.. i mean me and Andrew has goosebumps from that because of how unreal it was! we didn't call to any more owls the rest of that night and the rest of the owls didn't call for another hour afterwards! Quit an experience! We left there the next day Chicago bound to meet up with an old friend in Great Lakes, Chicago. We found Damian Moore in is Navy community with his wife Hailey Moore and we went out to dinner and went back to there house to visit and head to bed! Me and Andrew hit the road right off to grab Adam who stayed at a friend of his, Kevin Macksoud's place in center town Chicago. We got some breakfast at a local Panera bread near Kevin's and were then given a little tour of Chicago and some cool sights, the famous BEAN and some other cool buildings! But at the end of the day we made it to Kaukauna and got a very nice warm welcome from cousin Kimmy and her family, we celebrated with Culvers and are now recovering from such a joyfilled evening relaxing in the family room! Goodnight Kaukauna 

REUNITED! (WOOT)