Guns and Cheesecake

The OEM Kawasaki Concours Top Box

Most of this day was spent trying to find a Black OEM Kawasaki Topbox to fit the Concours. I figured that I was going to need more space than what the factory panniers offered (just an assumption, I hadn't gotten the bike yet so I had no idea how everything was going to fit), so I thought a lockable top box was the best option. I later discovered this was not the case, I'll explain in a later post. It took me about 3 and a half hours ringing up various distributors to find a black top box with a top cover. Apparently the box itself is really common, but the black trim panel cannot be found anywhere.

Anyway I finally found a place in West Virginia that had some in stock. The lady I was speaking to was very enamored with my accent ("I could speak to you for hours"), but very helpful. $360, I hope it does the job (spoiler: it doesn't).

Me shooting at zombie bin laden.

With that underway, Josh and I decided to perform a sacred American ritual of shooting the crap out of Zombie Osama Bin Laden targets with a range of firearms. I shot guns in Thailand before, but this was something else. Basically we could shoot almost anything we wanted, and there were a lot of guns available. For $50 plus ammo, we could shoot almost any non-automatic rifle on the wall (out of about 15). To shoot an automatic you need to book ahead.

More shooting, stance is probably
all wrong, but not much guidance
was to be had!

I guess the craziest thing was that all you had to do was sign a form, then they give you a gun and ammo. They spend about 10 seconds explaining how to use the gun, where the safety is and how to cock it. All of this is pretty much forgotten once on the range, so you have to try and guess how it all works (kind of half the fun I thought, like a puzzle). It isn't rocket surgery, but you need to know where the safety is, how to load the magazine, then how to cock it, then the position to hold it in. Most of this I just remembered from all the action movies I've seen over the years.


First up Josh and I shot an AR-15. Now these guns have all been modified to use 9mm rounds and to be semi-automatic. So you're not really getting what it'd be like in "real life". Don't get me wrong, these guns would kill and are the real deal, but you're not shooting larger rifle rounds or using full auto mode. The magazines are kind of hard to load, I think you spend most of your time just putting the rounds in them. After a while you can sort of reach a rhythm when loading, making it a bit faster. 


Shooting the rifle isn't really an issue, I'm pretty sure I was holding it correct, so there wasn't much kick to it. The rifle did have one of those electronic "red dot" sights that they have in Call of Duty, which was pretty cool.

This is my Thompson.
There are many like it but this one is mine.

Next up we shot a Barretta 9mm pistol, then some other futuristic rifle that I forget the name of. I wanted to shoot a PS90 (a civilian-ised P90), but unfortunately they were out of ammo because of the Zombie Apocalypse "Preppers". Yeah apparently here that's a real thing, there are people in the US who are legitimately preparing for a zombie apocalypse, and the PS90 is a very popular weapon among them. The shooting range staff member was equally weirded out by this as I was. 


The final gun we shot was a World War II era Thompson SMG (AKA Tommy Gun), used by the American forces as their standard submachine gun. It is pretty iconic to me because it has been in a lot of movies and computer games I played (including Enemy Territory, which I played a lot of). The gun is a little different from the other rifles because it took a .45 round (way larger than the 9mm we were using the the other guns), was "open bolt" and essentially way simpler than the others we tried. By far this was my favorite gun, it had a bit of kick and was surprisingly accurate with the iron sights.

Hit in the FAAAAACE

It was however probably not Josh's favorite rifle. Unfortunately for him, a stray shell casing came and landed under his glasses below his left eye, casing him to lose a bit a skin and be in a fair bit of pain afterwards. It could have happened to anyone, and thankfully it didn't actually end up in his eye.


So after that, we decided to head to the Cheesecake Factory (yeah, where Penny works in the Big Bang Theory) for dinner. As I understand it the Cheesecake Factory is a national chain of high(ish) class restaurants. As far as I know, we don't really do restaurant chains like this in Australia. The closest thing I can think of is Hogs Breath, but the food is not really comparable to the quality of the Cheesecake Factory. I kind of like the idea, it's similar to how you know that the food is always going to be good at Belluci's in Canberra.


The Cheesecake Factory food is really good, as is the service (which you would expect in the US) and the restaurant itself has really nice decor. One notable thing is that the menu is massive, there is so much to choose from it can be overwhelming. In the end I got the buffalo wings (really awesome, but apparently these might have skewed my expectations for buffalo wings in the future - they were the best Josh had ever had too), Pizza and of course cheesecake.


The cheesecake was amazing, I got one that mixed traditional and chocolate cheesecake into layers. I wish I got a photo of it. I was determined to finish it, but wow was it difficult - it was so rich!