Sorry for the delay in posting this, but I've been busy grading all those little brats papers...

For Thanksgiving week we went to visit friends and familly in France. We spent the first few days down in Southern France, in Perigord. One day of driven boar shooting with a good friend of mine and his hunting club. Very down to earth local people. No shots fired by me, but a great time. Ohhh, the food in that region of France... Confit de canard, musherooms (cepes), boar pate, hazelnuts... Wow!

At post waiting for boar in Perigord:

Then back up to good old Brittany where we used to live. Saw familly and friends for a day or so. More good food, including gallettes, crepes and cidre (well this is Brittany!!!). A half day of rough shooting with my gunsmith buddy there. Got a fat duck for my love's granny! Next day was another driven boar hunt. VERY narrow shooting lane and the boars were too fast for my limited abilities. No shots fired from my 9.3x74r Chapuis again, but great time. We were not allowed to shoot red deer sicne they save them for venerie (or a horse hunt like the British fox hunting, except for red stag!). But one tremendous stag tried to sneek past my post. He got within 3 meters of me. He was impressive, 12-14 or so points, but as I reached for my camera he caught the movement and with a big snort he bolted. That made day for me.

Here are the shooting lanes

Some boars:

Then off to Paris to visit another good friend of mine. After another good dinner, we had a looong conversation with nice drinks and lots of gun oogling

Last day was our annual driven bird shoot just south of Paris. Its a great shoot run by the famous Dulary brothers, who were sporting clays champions. About a 80/20 mix of partridges and pheasants. The normal set up is two drives in the morning, with a great lunch, and then two drives in the afternoon. But arround 10am it started to snow so the organizer pushed on and we did all four drives together to be sure we could do it before the snow put a stop to everything. I was in a good post on the last drive: lots of parts and some longtails flew over! The best part was the falling snow, simply beautiful. Unfortunately my camera decided to first run out of film and then break, so no drive pictures...

Then we went in for a great late lunch.

I'll try and add what few pictures I have in the next couple of days...