It’s Halloween! That means it’s time to do something other than fishing. I know, this is a great time to be out on the water chasing bass. The water’s cooling and the baitfish are shallow. But that’s not all there is to life. As much as I love fishing, and the fishing industry, this is the time of the year when I put it on the backburner, and I don’t regret it for one minute.
I’ve been working on new rod designs for Abu Garcia for the past couple of years. Lately that’s been my main area of focus. As of yesterday (Friday), however, all that’s been put to rest. We’ll talk about the new rods next week. I think you’ll find what we’re doing to be really exciting.
Becky and I are unboxing all of our decorations and stuff getting ready for next week. We have a trail behind our house that runs through the woods and along the lake. It’s made special for Halloween. It’s one of the many things I love about our home.
Halloween is a big deal around our house. I’m not sure how it all started but somewhere along the line things started to grow, and they never have stopped. Every year we do more and more. The trail gets longer and the decorations get bigger and scarier.
We decorate it with all sorts of scary things. We have a graveyard with a bunch of tombstones with crazy things written on them. We have several ghosts and as many goblins. Heck, we even have a mad scientist who’ll do some weird things in front of the guests at just the right times. It’s kind of crazy.
By the time you read this almost everything will be up and running.
We invite darn near anybody and everybody to enjoy the fun. Members of our families will be using the trail as well as our friends and neighbors. Most of the participants will be kids but we have a few kids-at-heart, too. No one is ever turned away. It’s a big deal.
I’d like to say that we do all of this for the kids, that we’re doing it strictly on their behalf. That wouldn’t be totally true, though. Actually, it wouldn’t be anywhere near true.
We do it for ourselves just as much. It’s one way we try to stay young and try not to turn into old fogies.
Being an adult, or “mature” as some people like to say, is OK, I guess. I mean, it has its place. But so does being a kid (at heart) and having fun. What’s the point of working hard and trying to be successful if you don’t take the time to enjoy it?
That’s enough about Halloween. I need to get going and help Becky unbox all our stuff. She says part of not being an old fogie is carrying your share of the load. I’m thinking she means me.
Mike Iaconelli’s column appears weekly on Bassmaster.com. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter or visit his website, MikeIaconelli.com.
