Guns!

So, I totally abandoned my poor blog while I was in England, which was an absolute blast. Five days in Yorkshire, a lovely English summer wedding in Gloucestershire, five days in Cornwall and then three heady days in London, trying to pack in as many people as possible. I've come back to Kansas to relax - along with several commissions, which should help me pay the credit card bill I amassed.

Except unfortunately I can't relax, as I'm off on the next trip - a week's journey across Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Arkansas and Michigan as part of the Ford Fiesta World Tour. What? Well, basically Ford has just launched a new Fiesta, and I've been invited on part of an enormous global trek in one of them. A nes Fiesta is driving from LA to New York, another from Northern Ireland to Dubai, another across South East Asia and another across Australia. Along the way, meanwhile, there are many adventures to be had.

Mine started this morning when I got up at 4am to catch a 6.10 flight to Phoenix. By 7.30 I was cracking on with the first activity - learning to shoot a machine gun. Seriously. Arizona (although I had never realised it) is the gun state - one in 50 people carry one and they sure are trigger happy. We were introduced to Katie, the petite and perky marketing manager at Scottsdale Gun Club, who informed us that she carries her own weapon (a Glock 27 handgun) but that her favourite to shoot is an M249 SAW (semi-automatic weapon) - "it's a lot of bullets and a lot of fun." Argh. Five minutes later I am trying my own hand at it - shooting, variously, a Smith & Wesson handgun, an MP-5, an AK 47 and the aforementioned SAW, which is bloody terrifying - you have to lie on the floor to shoot it, it pings bits of hot metal all over you and hanging out of one side is a belt of bullets.

Having thought that perhaps, I felt more at home in America than I had previously thought (I now love country music, for example), I've realised that I'm never really going to fit in - I just don't love guns enough. In fact, they terrify me. I don't think they keep you safer, I don't know why anyone would willingly carry something that is designed to kill another person and the smell of cordite makes me feel sick. Ah well. It was an experience, to say the least....