Candlepin Bowling

On September 27th, Mike's youngest nephew, Jacob, turned 3!  To celebrate the big event, I got to experience a game unique to Massachusetts - candlepin bowling.  It's pretty much like regular bowling, but with skee ball size bowling balls and tall, thin pins.  When you say you're going to go bowling, people always ask the question, "Big ball or little ball?"  I still giggle every time (I know, I'm so mature).

Mike and I are totally not competitive, as you can see

Actually, I'm okay with Mike being better than me at 2 things - bowling and mini golf.  I'm not good at either and I'm okay with that.  So, all competition was put aside to enjoy the game.

We rented 2 lanes.  One had a bumper and the other was grown up bowling style - open gutters.  Those gutters definitely saw some action that day (from mine and others' turns), but I was fairly impressed with myself on how I did.  I won't be joining any leagues soon but I had good beginners luck.  Maybe it had something to do with all the skee ball I played in arcades as a kid.  Not that I remember going to arcades that much, but when I did skee ball was my game of choice.  Probably because you could earn lots of tickets for "prizes" on those lanes....you know where you spend $20 on games to get a prize worth about $0.25, but I digress.

Other than the balls and pins, candlepin differs in a couple of other ways - 1) You get three rolls per turn (as opposed to two) and 2) the pins aren't cleared after each roll of the ball.  About half way through the game, I learned that the beauty of candlepin is that you can strategically use the downed pins still on the lane to knock down the rest of the pins.  It seems rather obvious to me now, but until Mike told his sister to do that, the thought hadn't occurred to me!

Check out my hot shoes with fluorescent laces!

It took a while for the birthday boy to warm up to the gang (he's going through a shy phase) but he seemed to be having a great time after the initial "hide behind the parents' pant legs" stage.  The bumper lane, mostly populated by the kiddos, didn't even get through an entire game.  It was actually pretty impressive how slow some of those balls were rolling down.  :) The non-bumper lane, mostly adults, got through almost two games.  A good time was had by all!

All the cute kiddos!