Arrival was uneventful and my plane landed within 15 minutes of scheduled arrival time. Going through immigration was a breeze with the longest time (about 3 minutes) that it took the immigration officer to look up the code for a sports shooter.

Bags came out very quickly on the carousel, except for my gun that was brought out by the Air Canada agent and personally delivered to the red zone for Customs inspection. It was comforting to know that the checks were in place at Air Canada and at the receiving end for my rifle. John Brewer had a harrowing experience. His gun never showed up and after a thorough and panicky search for an hour and a half by the airline and airport personnel, his gun was located sitting on the tarmac inside one of those trolleys. Someone must have got an xxx chewing over that!

I arrived at Terminal 3 and was to link up with Larry Taite who had landed an hour earlier at Terminal 5.  He had arrived from a direct flight from Los Angeles and the airline lost one of his bags. To make things even more interesting our mini van driver was late in picking us up because he was delayed by the first group of our shooters and was on his way back from Bisley. We ultimately got to Bisley at about 12:45 pm, not too bad all things considered. As of Thursday night Larry's missing luggage had not been delivered.

After a quick team meeting at 1:30 pm, Dean Morris, coach Mead and I were driven to the Mini Bus rental place in Ripley by Mid Tompkins.  The rental place is about 20 minutes away under normal circumstances.  Took us about an hour to get there through the narrow, windy roads of Bisley, Woking and Guildford. Gave me a good chance to visualize what it would be like driving through these roads. We arrived at the mini bus rental place which resembled more of a chop shop than an auto rental outfit. I declined to remove my driver's license from my wallet and Bob Mead and Dean Morris became the designated drivers by default. I was later given the high five and a fist bump by a couple of team mates for how slickly I got out of driving the bus :)

What should have taken an hour for the whole trip to and from the bus rental place turned into about a three hour round trip ride. We returned to find that the golf cart company had not yet delivered the carts. So, we drove the bus to the "armory" (really a 20' shipping container with a lock) and picked up our ammo cartons, broke out the cans inside and gave them to the shooters.

The WIFI internet system at the NRA office here in Bisley was out of order on Thursday, so no internet was available.

Next, we distributed our golf carts and are sharing them two per shooter. This allows us to carry our rests and gear as close to our yard lines as possible. "Thank you" Mik Maksimovich for making the arrangements that allows us convenient access to the line with our carts. We then needed to pick up our cleaning rods, solvent, programs and shooting mats that were shipped to a friend of Brian Otey's, Joe Domanski. He lives about twenty minutes from Bisley. We needed to make a small grocery run as well as eat, so Dean Morris, Bryan Otey, the two Bocks, Eric Bair and myself took off in the mini-bus to run the errands and eat. We ended up eating at the Hunter's Lodge where the food and prices were reasonable. We were famished and any food would have been welcome. My last meal had been 14 hours prior on the plane where I had been served a tiny plate of fruit (my specially ordered "vegetarian" meal). 

Got back to the Pavilion Hotel at about 10:30 at night and crashed for the night. It had been a long day.