BOWLING FOR LAUGHTER

My friends and I decide to go bowling.

There are two things wrong with this idea: #1 - It's school vacation week, so there are minions everywhere; #2 - we all suck at bowling.

The new bowling alley, only open for a few months, has several really cool features.  It has multiple golf simulators that are like separate rooms yet all connected to a bar/tavern room.  It has  another tavern room/restaurant, it has a special room for parties with its own set of lanes, it has a grill service mini-restaurant, and it has a small pro shop.  It even has a giant tree in the middle of it all.

It also has both candlepin and duckpin bowling.  That's right -- small balls and big balls.  Balls for everyone.  All kinds of balls: colored balls, solid balls, marbled balls, heavy balls, medium balls, light balls, amateur balls, and professional balls.  All these balls under one roof.  In honor of the bowling minions, they even have official minion bowling balls.  It's like a bowling ball extravaganza.

We decide on candlepins, partly because one of the women is a ringer with duck pins, but mostly because it's a real northern New England tradition.  The best part is that we can choose to have bumper lanes or not all at the same time.  Out of the four of us bowling, I want bumper lanes.  I know how badly I suck at bowling, and I hope to break a score of fifty after ten frames.  The alleys, completely technologically controlled, will set up the bumpers when I go to bowl and retract them when I'm done with my turn.

It doesn't take long before we all decide to put up the bumpers.  Thank goodness for the in-lane iPads.  All we have to do is edit the names on the scoreboard and choose "bumpers."  No one is the wiser (except people to our immediate left and right) that we need bumper lanes to keep from throwing continual gutter balls.

The only crick in the game is the kiddo next to us who has no concept of personal space and keeps walking into our alley as we are trying to bowl.  Well, that and the fact that one of us (not me) tries to bowl the wrong direction when winding up for the toss and losing the ball behind her.  It's okay, though, because it scares Alley Stealing Boy back into his respective lane.

The only true casualties of the day are our facial muscles, which suffer greatly at the laughter.  We may suck at bowling (we all broke fifty ... barely, but we did it), but we are truly winners when it comes to entertaining ourselves.