Well I finally got around to spending the time to look at seeing whether or not I could still score a Lottery Hunt somewhere. I won a hunt after not wasting time and $'s for 4-5 years after we moved up to Lake Texoma to see if I was going to survive the tender mercies of the Dallas VA and the 5 major procedure's as planned....and why we moved OUTTT of Dallas VA's service area Most recent Lottery Hunt was 2 or was it 3 years ago at the back then, usually very reliable Lake Mineral Wells and got skunked.

Over the years when I was active every year on TPW Hunts that Hunt was easy & reliable and always a favorite with really running the Hunt & still very Professional people...but the BH's Antique & Furniture bidnizz is taking all my time these days. She's found an outfit in Chappaqua New York that will ship Upper East Coast & New England local antique stuff to Dallas at "reasonable" costs and has 6 or 7 other locations she can pull from up and down the East Coast down thru the Carolina's. The company is now expanding to shipping from locations in the Upper Midwest too. Never a dull moment at my house for sure.

It only took me the 3 days that the BH has been down to Fayette County to her sister's ...and out of my hair for me to sift thru the Lottery Hunts and finally generate a 10 Entry pkg at locations I was familiar with from the old days of using the Old Style News Print Guide ... then I looked at the No Fee Private Land category and just could not "talk" the computer into ignoring the required Passport #.

FWIW I haven't seen my Passport since we got back from a 10 day trip to England gratis Holiday Inn for a nice room & airfare for 2 Then we came home from 10 days in Finland at the Annual Meeting of the Importers from all over the world.....and that was some 40 years ago. THAT was Best trip we ever took and I could go back to either place every year if I could...and could finally squeeze Scotland in too.

The "rock with a hole in it" that I picked up off the beach at the water line in front the of the White Cliffs of Dover and every time I look at it on my den's built in shelving unit under his picture in a leather flying helmet, is a reminder of all the P-51 pilots my father trained in air to air combat in Mississippi & graduation was a trip down to challenging the Navy pilots to a dogfight out over the water in Florida ...and would use the experience over the Channel or France ....and how important Dover's White Cliffs were as a seeable beacon to go home by from France.

But Ya gotta be kidding about needing a Passport # to get your TPW Private Lands application accepted. Oh well ...I don't have time for more than 1 or mebbe at most two 3 day Hunts anyway.

FWIW the BH & I have been chewing on the idea of opening a 2nd location going into the Christmas Season and being established in the market by next spring.... East Texas's Lake Country is being taken over by West Coast & MidWest refugee's from out of state & the DFW Metro area, and the Newbies "NEED" what we sell to furnish places to live "stylishly".
Ron

Wiley,
I assume your not serious about it requiring a passport number. It's only one of the options to use for logging in.

*Please provide one of the following options:
SSN: XXXXXXXXXX
Driver's License #:
Customer Number:
Passport Number:

SJ, I had already posted all the requested SSN, DL & CN info, and could not get the page to be accepted. Dunno what I was not doing correctly but I'll visit with TPW on the phone later this morning to see what I was not doing correctly. Not gonna make a big deal out of this and I'm sure the fault is got to be something I'm not doing correctly. But if I have to provide a Passport # as said, I'm not going to be able to. It was a fond memory of the trip to Europe so many years ago though.

Oh, one other tidbit that happened in Finland. The British SAKO distributor apparently for several years had been offering a trip to the Rihimaki plant & moose hunt as a Lottery incentive when the purchaser mailed in the Warranty card. It seems that the winner the year we were there was a refugee from Budapest who'd become a British citizen...with a history.

It seems that during the 1956 Uprising against the Russian invaders the guy who was 12 years old at the time had found or was given a stash of hand grenades to distribute ... but instead when his fellow resistors were being killed off, he used them to destroy 3 Russian tanks as they passed in formation by himself as they rolled by racing out from undercover jump up on the moving tank and opened the entry hatch and dropped a live grenade inside ... and the Russians still had him on a Hit List Target and had made multiple attempts on him in London. The American attendee's at the SAKO Conference began to notice that everywhere we went somebody was putting out the word about who the guy was and what he'd done as a 12 year old since he had an armed uniformed Finnish Border Guard "keeper" within arms reach at all times outside of the ski resort hotel we were based at.

At the shooting range where we all had to shoot to qualify for a Hunting License, and after all the other shooters were finished with their License Qualifying , the Border Guard put on a demonstration of accuracy on the moving Moose target that was on a cable track and moved at 40KM like I've never seen before on the 100 meter long cable driven track.

After the Moose Hunt we all one last major event with a Goodbye Dinner at a very famous restaurant in Helsinki, and the wait staff lined up and treated the guy to a standing ovation as we entered. I did not put 2 & 2 together until later but the Finn's still had a major grudge against the Russians for declaring War on Finland in 1946 after Germany had surrendered and invading Finland to capture any and all of Finlands manufacturer's of any thing of value, and seizing the warm water port, whose name escapes me & a very sizable strip of land from the Baltic Sea to the North Pole and did not allow Finnish citizens to travel back and forth to visit family members.
Too many memories from that trip for here but a fun trip down memory lane being triggered by my search for my Passport.
Ron