Huddle up at outdoors shows and indoors dreaming

Green Bay Packers fans will be glued to their TV screens Sunday, hoping their beloved Pack takes home the NFC championship.

“Inside the Huddle,” a popular show for Packers fans on a local TV station, shares the inside story on the players, plays and anecdotes that make our home team the stuff of legend.

This is the time of year when ice fishing’s heating up, archery season’s winding down, predator hunting is starting and planning for the coming year’s adventures as you huddle around a fireplace with a hot chocolate and a notebook is a relaxing way for any outdoors lover to spend the weekend.

My current accumulation of paper clutter includes two noteworthy items: The All-Canada Show Guide, obtained from a mountain-sized stack of them at the Green Bay Cabela’s store, and a 60-page catalog of hunting and fishing trips called Worldwide Trophy Adventures that I strongly suspect landed in my mailbox because of that same visit to Cabela’s.

I skimmed through the All-Canada Show newspaper rather quickly, disappointed that there was very little information on hunts. I think we all know Canada is a great place to fish, and most outfitters are going to treat you well, feed you well and maybe even give you free minnows. But the ads that would more likely draw me to the show this weekend at Green Bay’s Oneida Casino Radisson Hotel and Conference Center would be those for trophy whitetails, predators or bears.

But the thick catalog of outdoors trips that I mostly can’t afford burned up at least an hour of my valuable TV-watching time. Most of us have dreamed about African hunts, and I still hope to get there someday, either for plains game (semi-affordable) or dangerous game like Cape buffalo, leopards and other ornery critters (possible if I get really lucky on a scratch-off ticket, which I rarely buy).

A good friend and I have long discussed some wingshooting adventures, and the catalog was stuffed with dove hunting trips in Argentina, perdiz hunts in Uruguay (I had to look that one up, too — it’s a red-legged partridge) and waterfowl hunts in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Let the dreaming begin.

Anyone who’s gone on an out-of-state or out-of-country hunting or fishing trip knows that planning is nearly as much fun as the trip itself. One lasts for months, and as we add to the gear list and preparations, we realize that everything’s nearly perfect.

Then we actually go on the trip, forgetting the little things like sock liners and Chapstick and Chigarid (I got the worst case of chiggers I ever had on a Texas javelina and predator hunt a few years back), and suddenly realize that even though the trip is not perfect, it’s the absolute best thing you could be doing for those few, precious days. Work and probably family are hundreds or thousands of miles away, and you should have been doing this years ago.

Planning such a trip or even talking about it is going to make your life better, if only for a few moments, hours or days. Doing it can be life-changing.

Right now, I’m preparing to go backpacking with another friend who has lost 90 pounds. I need to lose some weight myself, and walking around a mall or neighborhood just isn’t going to hold my attention. The closest I’ve come to backpacking is a pair of Wyoming antelope hunts (one with bow, one with rifle), but we camped inside a rancher’s mobile home, not a tent, and only walked a couple miles a day at best. This ol’ hoss could use some exercise, and just practicing for the adventure with a heavy backpack is going to be more fun than trekking through the food court at Fox River Mall.

And if your dreaming is drifting toward the water, the WBAY Boat Show is Saturday and Sunday at Green Bay’s KI Convention Center.

Remember, it doesn’t matter if you actually buy a new boat, set up a trophy hunt or make it to a Canadian lodge — you’ll have almost as fun huddling with a buddy or two at an outdoors show or even at home, dreaming of your next adventure outdoors.

Ross Bielema is a freelance writer from New London and owner of Wolf River Concealed Carry LLC. Contact him at Ross@wolfriverccw.com.

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