Saturday, Feb. 16, 2008 - Splatz Paintball, Lock Haven: Shooting friends for fun.
Today was truly an awesome, awesome day.
It started a some time ago when Carla and I devised a surprise paintball trip for Kyle for his birthday. The plan
would not have come together without Troy spending days hunting down a place that was both close and in business. He found Splatz that opened last year, and after speaking with the own Lee on the phone, our trip was booked… two days before the event!
We all tried to round up friends, but because of the short notice and the cold weather, we went with a bare bones team of Me, Troy, Kyle, Carla, Jerm and Wendi. I'm think that was perfect.
At 11:30 when we left the house, it was 18 degrees and I'm sure that the high temp of the day was still in the 20's. Still, I never felt the cold once. And I get cold if it's below 70 in the house. As a matter of fact, I don't usually
leave the house if it dips below 20.
We played guys vs girls, or rather Vag's vs. Bitches.
This was during our lecture on paintball safety.
I giggle to myself every time I see this, although I am unsure why.
Hahahah. This is me. I look like I eat babies.
Loading up the balls.
Before the bleakness of hand to hand combat made us world weary.
30 seconds after that picture, Troy dumped his balls. I did it 2x more during the day.
We played for probably 3 1/2 hours. This was during one of our breaks to reload.
Somehow, Wendi ripped her crotch out of her pants and was showing everyone half vag. I gave her my snow pants.
Here are some of the blinds. I didn't take any pictures of combat because our ref, Jacob, gave us some horror story of broken cameras on the field. I love this camera too much to risk it's harm. I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but the snow is green from paint splatter. It looks like someone blew snot all of the field. This is evidence of how although all the guys were playing against their girlfriends, they did not give a shit about unloading tons of fucking paintballs as them. Which makes them, you know, fucking awesome boyfriends.
More carnage. This was about 1/2 through our day when we were still firing conservatively. I think that towards the end, we were shooting 2x as many balls and everyone was much more aggressive.
These are my gloves right before they went in the washer. Still stained with the tears of boys that got their asses handed to them.
I found this in my glove. I'll keep it as a reminder of how much ass I kick.
During our last game, we decided that we would no long play a game - we would just unload our full hopper at each other. Unfortunately, we all ran out of air one by one. When your gun runs out of air, it sounds like an Uzi. One by one, you could hear guns spaz out across the field. So funny! So anti-climatic!
These are just random memories that I want to write down so I can remember them for years to come:
During the next to the last match, everyone else got picked off and it came down to Kyle and me. After a long standstill, I ended up killing his ass,. That totally made up for his crazy shit talking to the girls.
Another awesome memory was Wendi falling, then tossing her gun ahead of her and crawling across the ground Rambo style.
Troy led off the game with his "Remember… when pushed, killings as easy as breathing."
Troy tried to creep up on me during the second to final round. He was stalking me sniper like, but being the bad ass I am, I took him out before he could do the same. I am awesome.
At one point during the earlier matches, Jerm was rushing a new blind and I shot at him about 14 times and not one paintball him him. It was like Jesus was his back-up deflecting all shots.
During another match, Troy was taken out and I ended up shooting him 2 or 3 times in the thigh when he was walking to the sidelines. It was still awesome, but I am sorry for the late shot. Kind of.
Most of my shoot-outs were with Kyle. I will never pass up an opportunity to shoot Kyle. Ever. I usually won. Or atleast in my mind I did.
We used 3 3/4 boxes of our 5 boxes of paint. That means we used 7,500 balls out of 10,000! And probably only 500 of those got spilled on the ground.
I rarely ever saw Troy. I think that he is so tall and thin that he just blended into the trees.
Jerm is absolutely merciless in his shooting skills. His kill rate was really high.
Kyle would never let me up from my blind. It was tough to even peak around the side. He was on it like white on rice.
Carla is the all-star shooter. She took out 2x as many guys as I did for sure. She was our Jerm - merciless. I vote her MVP of the game.
Wendi loved to shoot. She was def. the wild card on our team and did an awesome job of keeping the dudes down. I think out of all of us, she enjoyed the gun play the most.
Me. Well, I just fucking rad. Seriously, I make for a great bullet catcher. Also, I screamed every time I got hit - I over reacted to every shot (I get that from my Pop pop for sure). And I talk a lot of shit. And I shot the shit out of everything.
Here is a shot of our after Splatz dinner. We had a chance to tell stories and talk about how much we all kicked ass.
By the way, Lee at Splatz couldn't be a nicer guy. He was so accommodating and opened up his field for us on a cold winter's day when most other shops were closed. Jacob, who was our ref, was super nice as well and gave us lessons in how to be a better player and some great, great stories in between matches. You don't even know. I would highly recommend this field to any and all people that want to play. I don't know shit about what constitutes a good field from a bad, but I know that Lee is a good guy and deserves your business.
One other reason Lee is awesome is because of a conversation we had on the way out. He said, "You know, I love to see the girls out here on the field. You don't see that often, but I love to have them come." What I say to that is… Fuck Yeah! 1) Team Vag is awesome for going
and for going balls out. I think at the end of the day, the matches were probably tied and if they weren't, the score was really close. And that is AWESOME for 3 girls that have never hunted a day in our lives. All the guys were shooting/hunting for 15-20 years.
2) This sport is dominated by dudes and Lee and Jacob only knew of one professional lady team. So for Lee to be so cool to us and so supportive, that just says a lot about how great a dude he is.
And can I say that I enjoyed this so much more than last year when I learned to snow board. And, honestly, I would rather paintball than snow tube.
Here are my bruises. First is funny bone:
This is knee.
To wind it all down - this long and rambling post - I had a great, great, awesome time. It was more fun than I have had in a while. I couldn't imagine going with more kick-ass friends and these girls are just the awesomest. If every time we play is as great as this time… well, I couldn't ask for more.
We are planning a trip again for sometime in March. If you would like to join us (we already have 2 or 4 more people that would like to come), please let one of us know. We are thinking of dressing up like zombies and ninja because Kyle really wants to shoot a zombie.
Vag's and Bitches: If you read this, please feel free to leave a message about how kick-ass I am. Oh, I mean, how kick-ass the trip was.
Carla: I don't know if Kyle will read this because he's too busy being an undergrad, but please tell him Happy B-day from me again. And also let him know I can't wait to shoot him again.
