You have a great idea there! The Laundry thing is the best, but taking your new wife on a hunting honeymoon is almost as good.
We went for our 30th aniversary, and my 50th birthday. How is that for an accomplishment?
My wife had hunted whitetails as a kid with her dad but never shot and hated the sitting in stands and the cold. She liked squirrel hunting better and was a great shot. But that was a long time ago. She has also been on a real health kick the last few years and is now in great shape. (she does boot camp several times per week) She could run up and down those East Cape mountains all damn day! I think she secretely enjoyed running my ass off!
Originally she complained about a 10 day hunt and not wanting to do "only hunting". So we did 9 days. But we were gone for 23 days and did a full gammit of tourist stuff including renting a car and a leasurely drive down the Garden Route from PE to Cape Town.
We did the hunt first, but that really detracted (for us at least) from the rest of trip because even Table Mountain cannot compare to the secluded mountain tops we had to ourselves (with the PH and trackers) while hunting. And a game drive at Schotia to "shoot" an 18 year old lion with a camera is cool, but noting compared to being out with real "Wild" life. Even if we were not ever in the presence of dangerous game on the hunt.... Not much to get too excited about with a sleeping lion being circled by noisey tourists in overloaded vans. Maybe we got lucky with a nice camp, good people and a really great PH, but everything after the hunt felt anti-climatic.
Back to my wife and her expiance; A year ago she was determined to only take pictures. But then she decided she wanted a Zebra rug... I strategically refused to shoot "a damn horse" and a couple days later she decided she would shoot the Zebra but that was it. So of course she had to practice shooting... Well the guns I had did not fit her so we went shopping and found a gun and scope combo that "fit" really well. So she has her own gun, that leads to more "buy in". Took her out to practice after sighting it in and she had about a 3" 5 shot group in first time shooting anything bigger than a 22 in over 35 years. I asked her if she knew what that was and she replied "really bad? only one is in the bullseye". I told her every one was a dead Zebra! We bought a set of sticks and she practiced a lot with them. She shot a Blesbuck, Zebra, Black Wildebeest, Impalla, and Fallow Deer.
She had originally insisted that she wanted to break up the hunt and take a day or two to go sight seeing. So at day 4 or 5 the outfitters wife came and offered to take her for a day... She turned the offer down and later told me that she was afraid if she went, she might miss seeing something on the hunt. She kept a notebook and wrote down every species of animal, bird and reptile she saw. Took over 1400 pictures including some great landscapes she would never have gotten if not for going along on the hunt. And we passed on a lot of animals but she got pictures of most of them. Example is she stepped around a bush in a river bottom and got pictures of Wart Hogs right in front of her.
The PH understood this was not just about shooting animals, but rather about expieriancing them and their environment. He would pull over and let her take pictures and he actually got into ponting out the various birds, etc. Ann never got "buck fever" because she really did not care as much about shooting the animal as gaining the whole expieriance. But she explained she was going to shoot them because she really enjoyed the "sneaking" up to them and she liked being up front. And she understands the whole big picture of hunting adding value and being nessasary to manage the animals.
There was one other lady in the camp a few days but the outfitters wife showed up most days for lunch so Ann could visit with her a few minutes most days. Doing it over we would like go with my brother and his wife some time. Our wives both enjoy the outdoors and have a lot of fun together.