Lawn Bowling

A perfect Sunday afternoon activity. Haidee texted me to see if I wanted to go lawn bowling. I said sure, and dragged along Alex, who then called Matt and Karen (who also ended up giving us a ride), and bang - we had a game on our hands! The club was deserted so we had the place to ourselves. After an initial beer and an informative session provided by the club's lawnsman Randall, we got down to business! Lawn bowling is basically like a cross between Bocce ball and curling, in that you throw (underhanded) a ball towards the jack, which is a smaller, lighter white ball. Since the jack isn't secured onto the field, if you bump it, it moves. The balls you throw are not perfectly spherical - on purpose - so you can't just aim at your target, you have to take the curve into account, which adds the element of surprise to it :)

Once each team has thrown an equal number of balls, whichever team has the closest ball wins. If that team has two balls closest, and the other team's closest ball is third closest, the winning team scores two points. If they have three balls closest before the other team's closest ball, they score three points, and so on. We didn't keep score, and we didn't really have teams, but we did have a lot of fun and we celebrated whoever got closest (that person then got to go first on the next round). There are a few more rules, but let's just leave it at that :) Randall and pal in the peanut gallery offered some commentary and congratulations where appropriate.

You can see more in the Picasa photo album "Lawn Bowling" (click on the "Photos on Picasa" link to the right). In the meantime, here's a photo of the intrepid lawn bowlers:

L-r: Matt, Alex, Haidee, Karen