Saturday was my first paintball experience. I rolled out of bed almost the same time as I would on any given weekday (ha! you thought I’d say “Sunday!”) and drove up the 5 towards Valencia. I arrived at Alfonso’s house around 8:30am and we proceeded to the complex. I had nothing to eat -and there was even less to eat once we got to the site.<\/p>\n
After hours of preparation we headed up the hill (me decked out in Alfonso’s leftover gear) to shoot at each other. I was shot in the head ten seconds into the first game. In general I can’t say I enjoy paintball. Then again – maybe I was just hungry as hell. At mid-day we ate home-packed sandwhiches in the parking lot. <\/p>\n
The one game I really enjoyed was the giant battle simulation. On a field full of old tires and burnt out automobiles (and a few boats) 150 “walk-ons” were sorted into two teams and then set loose until everyone on one team had been shot. I fared fairly well in both games (it is customary to simply switch sides after the first game for a quick second game). Because it was a much longer game I quickly ran out of ammo. By the start of the second game I had about a third of a hopper left. I decided to make the best of the situation and made my way to the very front line (the “50 yard line” as the experienced call it) to act as a sniper (it is extremely tough to get accurate shots from far away). This would end up making up for my earlier wussiness. <\/p>\n
I came away with no confirmed kills – but several bloody bruises and burnt skin (I forgot sunblock). At closing (sundown) we headed back to Alfonso’s house and after showers we devoured five boxes of pizza.<\/p>\n
I’ll probably play again – maybe a few times a year. I didn’t enjoy it enough to start buying paraphernalia. Especially since the equipment can get prohibitively expensive ($1,800 for a good gun, $300 for one day’s worth of balls, etc.).<\/p>\n
And no, it doesn’t hurt as bad as people say. My first hit was in the forehead and I barely knew it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saturday was my first paintball experience. I rolled out of bed almost the same time as I would on any given weekday (ha! you thought I’d say “Sunday!”) and drove up the 5 towards Valencia. I arrived at Alfonso’s house around 8:30am and we proceeded to the complex. I had nothing to eat -and there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}