I left with plenty of time on Friday. But still ended up being horrifically hurried at the end, and a good half-hour late.

To begin with, made the mistake of calling my game warden and asking if he had any CWD or DNA samples to go to the regional office, and their freezer.

Uhhhh, yeah. One CWD sample. From his son's deer. But he hasn't cut out the lymph nodes yet.

Okay, if you have them out by the time I get to your house, I'll take them up.

Were they out?

Noooope.

And yeah, since he ended up carving away on the wrong part of the neck, guess who pulled the glands?

Awww. You guessed.

So. A half-hour wasted.

An hour and a half later I can tell I'm going to be hitting Regional Town right about noon. So I call the boss, making sure someone will be around to get the samples into the freezer, and so I can pick up the fur and skull collections.

Come in the door, and office gal advises me the furs and skulls aren't there. Seems despite my call to reserve these things, made over three weeks ago, another fellow has been using them this morning. In Malt Town.

Fifty-five miles away.

Craaap.

Good news is he's on his way back. And so, one hour and twenty-five minutes later, we're on the road home. (Did I mention I had both heeler sisters with me? The little one's first road trip since her surgery on the 21st of September. Still had to be on leash outside of the truck, and lifted in and out, but she was thrilled. And hyper. Didn't relax much, either. Think she had forgotten how noisy it is in the truck, and hard to get good sleep. Her sister, on the other hand, had gotten used to having the entire truck to herself, and was more than a little bitchy.)

Good news about the delay in receiving the furs is I also got to use the grizzly and wolf furs, for the first time. Huge animals, both, and a thrill to run yur fingers through (for those of us who don't get to do it when they're alive).

Now, I also needed a bunch of plant specimens, gathered along the highway, and all those stops added at least a half hour to the return drive. A half hour I didn't have to spare. But there was good news there, too.

I realized it when we were about eight miles outside of Regional Town, and happened to look at the GPS.

Regional Town is 1,000 feet lower than home. Which means it's actually just about the middle of October for them, rather than the first week of November.

Their plants might still have leaves!

Which they did. First year in all seven years we've been doing this that the wife and I had good leaves on our greasewood, rabbitbrush and willow specimens.

Net result was I got home two and a half hours later than I planned. Leaving a half hour to pack everything I had planned on using two hours to pack.

So, naturally everybody was waiting on me when I finally got packed, loaded and dressed for the youth group trip. But, as the other driver said, "I knew you'd be on [Grouse] time."

But this time it wasn't my fault.