Making Lemonade

So this past week has been brutal... ok, it wasn't that bad, but it started brutal. I spent the week prior at a lakeside cottage to celebrate my wife's 30th birthday. It was most excellent... until I lost my wallet doing a cannonball off of the pontoon boat.

I proceeded to drive back to Colorado from Michigan without my wallet knowing that I would spend the next morning at the two worst places to go to in a hurry, the DMV and the Airport. See, I needed a license to get my rental car once I landed in Indianapolis for my business trip. So I proceeded to wake up the next morning and somehow manage to get a new license and still make a 10am flight out of DIA.

I originally planned on bringing my gear and fishing over the weekend, but alas... I didn't have time to check luggage. So I took my laptop and a carry on full of work clothes. I was degected to say the least. The week was quite an uneventful stay of meeting clients and spending my nights drinking whiskey/diets in my hotel room. But this is fall, and more importantly, the first week of college football!

So on Friday afternoon I white-knuckle drove up to South Bend, Indiana to watch a 9am kickoff of Notre Dame vs Navy in Dublin, Ireland with my brother and sisters. It was a great Saturday morning that started with coffee/bailey's and went well into the night until the campfire dimmed and my fingers hurt from playing tunes on my brother's daughter's guitar. I already felt like things were as good as could be after how the week started. To top it off, I found an old 4wt sitting at my mom's house in Niles, Michigan (about 15 minutes from South Bend) and went down the local fishing store to find some flies. The old dude working had no idea what I was talking about, but he was a swell fella and he offered me a cup of coffee. We talked briefly about local politics, the grape harvest and finally flies. He said that he had a small box of flies, but didn't know much about fly fishing. His store was focused more on the glitter-boat and bait dunker crowd. I took a look and you could tell that they were a ragged pile of poorly tied flies. I grabbed a few of the foam beetles and something that resembled a Royal Wulff and headed down to my hometown creek to salvage what I believed to be a "non-fishing weekend". The trout were willing and I caught a few small browns before heading back to Indy. I didn't have my camera, so I snapped the pick above before I left of the creek with my phone.

Overall, a great Notre Dame victory and a wonderful morning of browns sipping dries... I think I salvaged this one nicely...

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