Crazy Curling on a pond in Durham, NC

The curling match between old friends really happened today in Durham, NC. Let me tell you these were not crazy young adults, I was among friends that were around my age (early 50s) to a few years older. The pond was larger than mine and we had nine people on the pond at one time.

Did the ice crack? Yes it did and often, it took me 30 minutes to get the nerve to join them as at 240 lbs I was the heaviest person on the ice.

That is me tossing my first curl. The water jugs were just thought up before the event since we did not have granite curling rocks. The blue bucket is the goal when tossing from the other side. You play this game kind of like shuffleboard.

X was our team, note the x mark on my 'rock'.

Barney a Canadian who has actually curled in a league!

You can't curl your rock without having someone brush away the ice along with the rock.

Ken on his knees after tossing his rock, he was on my team.

That is Roger another Canadian and the only player in skates! The white pipe there is the other goal, we did lots of improvising.

This is Jon he was on my team also. He is not from Belgium!

David from Australia. I was very glad to see him well again, the pond is in his neighborhood.

Ken from the USA is action!

Roger in action once again. Our team lost because when we reached 10 points to win, the rules required us to win by two points and since they had 9 points we played on and they scored enough to win the game. We were on the ice for 2 1/2 hours playing, what a hoot. I was surprised no one stopped in to see what we were doing as a good number of cars went by.

A view of the playing field once we were finished playing! It'll be probably a decade before we can have another match like this one as it is warming up all this coming week and ice like this does not happen very often in Durham.