The Missouri trip was a lot more draining and tiring than I’d expected. The nine days I was there taught me a lot about quite a few things… And overall, I think I am a better person (and photographer) because of the trip.<\/p>\n
So what have I learned from this trip?<\/p>\n
1. Midwest Chinese food sucks no matter how much the locals rave about it — it ain’t Chinese… It’s… Frankenstein Americanese<\/em> food…<\/p>\n 2. People who are serious about guns and treating them as sporting equipment make tremendous financial, emotional and physical investments in the sport.<\/p>\n 3. Action pistol is an expensive sport — each round of bullet costs $0.30 (more if custom made). And on an average practice shooting session, one can go through 700 to 1,000 rounds — that’s each day times almost seven days a week.<\/p>\n 4. Based on what I gathered, action pistol sport is 10% skills and 90% mental, just like many competitive sports. They say you can only learned so much on the skills, and the rest is all in the mind.<\/p>\n 5. Most shooters I met are great people — not the “red neck” image I’d stereotyped them as. But that changed when I heard the speech from the president of NRA on the last night of the event. He made a few comments about NRA, guns and politics that made me shake my head a few times even among a room full of gun owners…<\/p>\n 6. Missouri does have a NPR station. But I guess it doesn’t get enough funding to have all the good stuff that other big cities enjoy. Instead, it plays classical music most of the time for which I mistakenly wrote it off entirely as a NPR-less state.<\/p>\n 7. Driving on gravels can feel like driving on ice sometimes — when it skids, the car may or may not stop…<\/p>\n 8. There’s a place for big gas goessling American trucks, and that place is called the American Midwest. And I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or negative way. When my client wasn’t practicing shooting, I took some time off to drive around “the woods” in the more rural areas of Missouri. And I soon realized those were no place for luxury gas-friendly Toyotas or Lexuses… Those were some rough roads with car-unfriendly conditions. And by being big, cheap(er) and possibly more capable of standing up to abuse, American trucks would fare well there. And indeed 90% of trucks I saw there were American — and they are huge and mighty.<\/p>\n 9. For whatever reason, gas prices in Missouri was just as expensive as California.<\/p>\n 10. Australians have far superior gun control laws than those in the United States. Americans could learn a few things from the Australians on gun control.<\/p>\n I enjoyed the trip, enjoyed seeing more nature, and enjoyed the learning experience. I look forward to processing 3,500+ images I shot there in the coming days…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Missouri trip was a lot more draining and tiring than I’d expected. The nine days I was there taught me a lot about quite a few things… And overall, I think I am a better person (and photographer) because of the trip. So what have I learned from this trip? 1. Midwest Chinese food … Continue reading “On Missouri”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-day-to-day-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p54IqZ-ew","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}