August 25, 2024
Contest rest day today – the mission is to recover from the stress of 7 straight flying days and prepare for as many as five more. The official contest rest day activity is an afternoon at Ox Ranch – a remarkable hunting ranch / tourist attraction which is – I think it's safe to say – well outside experiences unusually provided to World Gliding Contest pilots and crews.
This ranch occupies 18,000 acres in the hill country about half an hour's drive northwest of Uvalde. It offers things you might expect, such as accommodations, a restaurant, swimming, hiking, wild animal viewing – and some you might not: You can shoot a high-powered rifle or a machine gun, choose from a collection of WW-II tanks – and drive it, and even shoot its gun. You can track and hunt native and exotic animals (trophy white-tailed deer are apparently a specialty).
Seeking to relax and catch up on postponed work (I enjoy providing these reports, but can't claim to be efficient at producing them) I decided to opt for a quiet day at the comfortable house just west of the Uvalde airport that is the base of operations for Team L – which makes me unqualified to report in detail on the event at Ox Ranch. But I can relate what others have reported, which is that this was a grand experience. Highlights included hand-feeding giraffe and rhino, and a safari excursion that caught sight of a good fraction of the ranch's species, which include elk, bison, buffalo, kangaroos, various deer, Texas longhorn cattle, zebra, ostrich, various sheep and goats, and a considerable variety of African antelope. There was even a stop to view ancient tracks of dinosaurs (sadly, the ranch cannot yet offer live versions of these).
John Good