Loomis Weekend, 17-19 December 2010

I've been to Seattle a few times now, and up till this year had not made it out to the "family cabin" at Loomis.

So when Kara and I were able to get 5 weeks off to have a family Christmas in Seattle, my father-in-law set aside a weekend for a "men only getaway" up to the cabin.



We ate meat. We drank beer. We shot guns. We watched movies. Not necessarily in that order, but those were the key ingredients to the weekend.

Loomis is about five hours' drive east of where we are (just north of Seattle), beyond the Cascade mountain range. It was colder out the other side of the mountains (down to 11 degrees F at night, and up as high as the 20s F in the daytime), so we saw snow.

The front steps to the mobile home.

Setting up the ribs on Saturday morning.

6 racks of ribs. 6 men. You do the maths. After an hour smoking over coals in the small grill, they were wrapped in foil and transferred to the oven for the rest of the afternoon while we went out and shot handguns and rifles.

With Nike's cooking, you don't really need lunch. A big breakfast - sausage and biscuits on Saturday, massive cheese-potato-meat-scrambled-egg on Sunday - and a big dinner is food enough. Prepared with his own recipe of rub (containing who-knows-how-many different spices), those ribs were excellent. And yes, I did eat a whole rack on my own.

The calibres I shot over the weekend.

Not only was I the new guy to Loomis, but I'd never shot a firearm before. (Bows and arrows in Ghana don't count for much.) So I've now been initiated into the use of .22s, .45s, rifles, and 10- and 12-gauge shotguns. I "killed" some potatoes, and some soft-drink cans, as well as clay pigeons.

And I was out in falling snow!