Thanksgiving in Wheat Country

November 30, 2009 at 10:28 am
filed under My kind of culture

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! We spent Thanksgiving week in Kansas visiting my family and pheasant hunting near Russell. We had a great time! While I didn’t hunt, I went along for the ride and played photographer.

West Kansas, as you can see, is wheat country. Black gold hides under the surface, and the land is dotted with oil wells. It’s a barren, rough landscape. Strangely romantic.

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This road leads to Bunker Hill, population 100.

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While hunting, we came across a flock of turkeys. Unfortunately, wild turkey was not on the Thanksgiving dinner menu that day–they were on someone else’s wheat field.

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Pheasant hunting is truly a sporting event. You tromp through dense thickets to scare up the birds (we call the thickets “boo patches”). When a bird emerges, you distinguish whether it’s a rooster or a hen. If it’s a rooster, you hike up your gun and take aim–as it’s flying away from you. If you are lucky, some of the bird shot hits it and you release the dogs, who will fetch the bird. Mostly though, it’s a lot of trudging through fields.

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If you have enough people, you can encircle a field and close in on the birds.

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Here’s Grandpa and Stealth, his lab, who’s an incredible retriever.

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I made Grandpa stop the truck anytime I saw a photo opp.

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Along the way, we stopped to check wells and do some grunt work. (Not me, of course.) ;)

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And took a pit stop at Stan and Penny’s farm, some of our cousins. Gramp and Stan talked guns in his shop.

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And I photographed cows. They didn’t like it very much.

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Then we loaded up for one last round of hunting.

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And as we closed out the last day of hunting, Evan got himself a bird!

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It’s in our freezer waiting to be cooked into a pheasant pot pie. :)

We had Thanksgiving at Grandma Marguerite’s house. The kitchen, inevitably, is where we congregate. This is a pretty typical scene.

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And at the end of the week, we drove back to Lawrence and did city stuff again. You can’t ride a scooter in the country!

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All in all, it was a great trip. Thanks for the fun guys!

(And Grandpa, I’ll send you pictures on a CD sometime this week.)

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