Main Street at the Big Sandy. Firing line is on the left, its hot so everybody put up a cover. And there RVs on the right. It's best to stay real close to your guns.

I did find out by talking to folks here at the shoot, and reading some of the signs on main Street, that this would be an extremely bad location to have a meeting of the Joe Biden fan club.

The Big Sandy shoot was going to be over at noon, so with my ears still ringing, I decided to pack up and beat feet on down the road. So I headed South and, after an hour and a half or so, ended up in Congress, Arizona, where I really like but haven't been for a couple of years.

I was in need of a place like Congress, which offers boondocking in a peaceful, uncrowded environment because I'm really in need of some peace and quiet right now and not being elbow to elbow with a bunch of shooters that know a lot about shooting but not much about RVing.

Which is a good segue into something I've complained about before, which is every time I'm around people in RVs that aren't RVers, but just folks that use an RV to stay in for a couple of days while they're pursuing some other hobby always has the same problem. They don't know the unwritten rules of RVing.

In this case, the Big Sandy shoot did write down some of the rules, and everybody had to sign the paper signifying that they had read the rules, but it seemed like everybody ignored them.

Almost everybody there had some form of a generator, and quite often, it was a contractor generator. And even though the rule said they had to be turned off at 10 o'clock every night, a lot of folks left them running all night. Every once in a while strangers would stand right next to my little camper and talk to each other as if I wasn't inside, having to listen to their conversation 5 feet from my wall. People would show up late at night, and I'm talking after midnight. And instead of just doing the minimum possible, then going to bed, and getting unpacked in the morning, they would be unloading their quad and setting up their outdoor furniture at 2 a.m. as if they were the only ones here when there actually only 15 feet from my door.

I have very few problems like that when I'm dealing with actual RVers. These things mostly occur when I'm around folks that use their RV as a place to stay when their real hobby takes them away from home. I guess I can't really blame them, their well-meaning people; they just don't understand all the unwritten rules of RVing... Maybe somebody should write down all the unwritten RV rules.

                                                           Theboondork

Some gun collectors just don't know when to quit. I had that affliction myself but I think I've only got 20 or 30 guns left.

The bronco happily, and peacefully boondocked in Congress Arizona.

My boondocking neighbors to the north of me, there a couple of hundred yards away

My boondocking neighbor to the south of me. It's the little white trailer on the left side of the picture. This is peace and quiet to me, and I sure need it after the crowds and the noise of the Big Sandy Shoot.

I've shot machine guns before so they weren't all that interesting to me, but I really liked the big guns. I wonder if I could tow one of these behind the bronco. I could really clear out a lot of boondocking spots toten firepower like this.

I had a great time at the shoot last night. The night Shoot started at dark which turned out to be 7 o'clock, and I got there early and set up my tripod in a pretty good location that wouldn't have been available half an hour later; it got pretty crowded.

I think the only time my readers have seen a picture that I took with my camera on a tripod is some pictures of the Moon, the Milky Way, and now the Big Sandy night shoot. Needless to say, I don't like using a tripod; it's in the way; even though it's carbon fiber, it's still fairly heavy, and I'd rather brace myself against something instead of toting around and setting up a tripod. But last night called for it, so I had to deal with the inconvenience.

I need to give everyone a little background on what goes on at the Big Sandy shoot so the pictures will make some sense First, it's not a contest; everyone is there shooting just for the fun of it and meeting others that appreciate the same hobby as you do. So the gun range tries to make the three days of the shoot as fun for the shooters as possible, so here are the things they do.

The shooters are shooting across a valley. And there are various kinds of targets at distances ranging from 100 meters to about a mile and a half. So there are hundreds of targets. Some targets might be just an empty cardboard box, and some targets are wrecked cars. Some of these empty cardboard boxes might contain an explosive like half a stick of dynamite; others might include a whole stick of dynamite. And the wrecked cars might be empty, or they might contain a full propane tank with a stick of dynamite taped to it. Does that sound destructive? You're darn right it does, and everybody loves it.

The night shoot has the same type of empty or explosive targets that have been replenished when the range stops all shooting at 4 o'clock or 1600 hrs. If you still fit into your military uniform. When they start shooting again at dark, the area is, of course, pitch black, so the shooting range crew will launch military-style flares, I'm talking super-bright, slowly floating down to the ground, in various colors, to light up the target area, or as some of the shooters refer to it as "the battlefield."

A few of the shooters, the rich ones, will shoot tracers, which can easily be seen at night, and leave a light trail as they go for the target. But tracers are extremely expensive, so most people shoot regular bullets, which you can't see at night. And the only way you know the bullet was even there is when something explodes.

All this is great fun to watch but far too expensive for the average person to be able to afford to do, especially with the cost and scarcity of ammunition for the last few years.

                                                                                                                                                         Theboondork

Machine guns are expensive to buy, complicated to maintain, and they can run through a thousand dollars worth of ammunition in a very short afternoon. I didn't see many young people that owned these guns, it was all old geezers with enough free time, and enough spare money to afford a hobby like this.

This is what happens when you park your car in the wrong area at a machine gun shoot.

If I could buy a Canon it would have to be a small one, maybe something that looked big but shot 22's.

At night everything changes, targets get harder to see and the flares are blinding. Somebody shooting green tracers that's the green streak across the middle of the picture.

Orange flares slowly rain down over  "the battlefield" lighting up hundreds of acres of the Arizona darkness.

The red flares slowly descending turn the landscape into an eerie red glow, as things explode all up and down the firing line, very much like a real battlefield.

Being a Baby Boomer I was raised on two kinds of movies, cowboys and Indians, and World War II. I made this picture black and white because it reminded me of every battle scene in old World War II movies.

My first sunset at the Big Sandy Machine Gun Shoot. By no means spectacular but I think it captures the ruggedness of the desert mountains in Arizona, and the bleak isolation of this largely uninhabited part of the Arizona desert.

My hearing is poor, to say the least, and I started getting that way when I was in the Air Force, working on the flight line, around running jet engines. I probably made it worse by being a shooter for most of my life when hearing protection wasn't commonly used, and by the time I wised up, most of the damage had been done.

Of course, getting older certainly doesn't help your hearing as you lose some just naturally as you age. Losing your hearing, to one degree or another, is a serious handicap, but it's just about the only handicap that doesn't get you any sympathy at all; in fact, it's just the opposite, some folks treat you like you have mental problems just because you can't hear every word they say.

So why am I talking about my hearing today? It's because today was extraordinarily noisy. I brought my mouse ears with me, which is something you always do when you're around shooting, but I forgot to bring my earplugs and left them in the bronco. So even though my headphone type hearing protectors are suitable for ordinary shooting, when you're around machine-gun fire or cannon fire, you really need earplugs and mouse ears. So I had to get back on the shuttle that takes folks from the boondocking area to the firing line, which is about half a mile or so, up and down a pretty steep hill, to get my earplugs before I lost what little was left of my hearing.

                                                                     Theboondork

My sunrise this morning, again was nothing to write home about but it signaled the beginning of another day of the joy of being on the road and doing what I enjoy doing.

By sunrise this morning my boondocking situation had changed considerably since yesterday, and the crowds are starting to gather. I'm not thrilled with being around crowds, and this is way too close to neighbors in my ordinary boondocking world. But seeing as how this is reportedly the largest machine gun shoot in the world, some compromises on my part have to be made.

I don't know if The Big Sandy is the biggest machine gun shoot in the world, but I've never been to one bigger.

The bronco is at the end of the road just about in the middle of the picture. You can see the shuttlebus coming up the hill, I suppose I could walk, but its 90° outside today, and the hill where you see the shuttlebus, is a lot steeper than it looks.