Throwing Stones!

Saturday night we decided to try something truly Canadian for girls night - Curling! Ten of us headed to the local curling club to throw some "stones" as the curling rocks are often referred to.We had a volunteer assigned to us and he helped us along, showing us pointers and explaining the rules. It's a lot like shuffleboard, except on ice. You divide into two teams and take turns sliding the rocks or stones down the ice, in hopes of getting closest to the bullseye target at the end of the lane. You try to knock your opponent's stones out of the circle while leaving yours in. The "skip" is your teammate at the end who directs you with which direction to slide your rock. The sweeps use their "brooms" to smooth the ice in front of your rock to help it slide along faster. You have a grip on one shoe to prevent slipping and a slide on the other shoe to help you slide while throwing. The ice is actually quite slippery - two people fell over the course of the night, one quite hard. At one point, the guys in the lane next to us yelled "Get those girls some helmets!" to which we responded "Don't mind us, we're Americans!" That got a couple of laughs. In the beginning we were either throwing too hard and it was out of bounds or too softly and it wasn't making it down the lane, despite our vigorous sweeping efforts. After a few practice throws we started getting the hang of it and it turned out we weren't bad. We ended up with a lot of stones "in the house" (meaning they were in play) and actually started figuring out the strategy to knock each other's stones out. We all had a ball and agreed we'd like to do it again sometime now that we've got the technique down.