Down Under Day 3

I got a lot of work done today and in the afternoon went for a long run. The scenery here reminds me so much of Montana with eucalyptus trees. The mountains are awesome. I’ll take my cameral tomorrow.

My bowling début finally arrived and I headed to the club. They welcomed me with open arms and told me all about the game. I got asked a dozen times why I was in Dungog and then asked what could possibly have brought me here. I had a great time. The game was really fun and the people were awesome. You play in teams of 3 and it is one team against another so you are paired against another team for the game. There were 6 teams playing so there was 3 lanes we were using. Here’s a picture of the playing area.

As you can see it is an open terf area and you roll a small yellow ball (kitty or Jack) to the other end. Then try to roll your ball as close as you can to the kitty. It is a lot like our lawn bowling at home with one major exception. The balls here are waited on one side so they curve a lot. For example you have to roll it out away from the kitty and have it curve back in. as you can see in the picture the guy, Ron my coach, isn’t aiming straight at the yellow ball at the other end. The trick is to gauge how hard to through it (how heavy) and how wide to through it (how much grass). We played for a couple hours (you go 12 times so 6 times from each end). At the end they had some food and people just sat around and talked. Little by little the numbers decreased until there was Robin (the most celebrated female bowler of the club), Bob (a great guy that was on my team, in the picture he is on the other end with the beard), Ron (my coach and an extremely nice guy), the club manager and his wife who were both really nice, Ken (the most celebrated bowler of the club having won the club championship 19 times), Spencer (business owner and president of the club) and I. We talked till way after 10. They told me all about the history of the town and how much they loved it here. They told me of famous people from Dungog, a cricket player and an equestrian Olympic medalist. They talked about when dairy industry was deregulated and almost all of them went out of business. They also talked about when the government turned state forests into federal parks and whipped out their timber industry. They used to have a milk plant and 3 lumber mills now none of them exist. There is still a lot of farming but very few dairies. Just what I was looking for.

In the end I now have a group of mates who are all over 60 who play a wonderful game of bowling, the real way they say. They gave me a towel from their club as a memento.