My friends who are most successful at an outdoor hunting lifestyle take advantage of hunting opportunities locally, but are all highly mobile. Buy a nice reliable pickup, get a shell and set it up for basic sleeping and camping, and keep it set up. Being outdoors is something kids love - they will enjoy the many short trip and it prepares them for longer trips and hunting across the country. One friend’s wife won’t camp out so they bought a mini winny and they drive the wheels off it hunting coyotes and prairie dogs all summer, antelope and mulies in the fall, Texas hogs in the winter, salmon runs in the spring. They are both highly educated professionals with busy professional schedules and high expectations, so they take advantage of any break in their schedules.
I learned a great deal from Scandinavian friends with respect to travel in the US, with or without young kids - an American will plan out a trip to a neighboring state a month in advance, get everything ready, make plans at work to shift a project, get excited the week prior to the trip, and finally do it. A European is always ready travel, calls a friend to help drive that weekend left work at 4:00, drove until after midnight, and spends all weekend enjoying it and drives back home in the dark and makes it to work Monday morning. Goes to another state the next weekend, and another state the weekend after that. Finally the week the American is traveling one state over, my Scandinavian friend will catch a sale on plane tickets last minute and fly across country for the week and see 4 different states while there. They grow up highly mobile with good traveling skills and it carries over into adulthood.
If I mentioned a farmer named Doug in western South Dakota, 5 miles past the Piggly Wiggly on country road 58 had a ton of prairie dogs he wish someone would shoot, he’d call farmer Doug right then saying Taper thought he had too many prairie dogs and offer to shoot at 1,000 of them that weekend if he’d be interested in letting them camp on his property. Before the first day farmer Doug would be putting them up at the house and at midnight the farmer would be singing drunken Norwegian drinking songs, then making them breakfast before heading out to show them the best fields.
Both families above love to socialize with other hunters and that is contagious and results in many hunting opportunities from the people they meet.
Everyone’s different and defines a happy outdoor/hunting lifestyle differently, but you may find pulling a trigger is just one part of it. I’ve never pulled the trigger on a bear on Kodiak, but I’ve been 50 yards from one on the upper end of big and it’s a great memory. Same with finding elk and mulies in Colorado - I haven’t pulled the trigger on one, but finding them late in the summer doesn’t require a tag and a glorified backpacking trip into amazing country can be as rewarding as pulling the trigger in an average spot. It’s the same hunting, it just doesn’t involve punching the tag. I’m getting old enough to notice eye sight isn’t what it was, arthritis makes every hurt a little more every year, definitely past my prime, and of all the game I’ve taken and good hunting memories the best memory was an amazing deer found during a scouting trip that I was able to watch 200 yards away for a half hour. Still makes my heart race just telling the story.
