Wine, Dine, Curl

Last weekend we headed south to Columbus for their Women's bon spiel, which had the theme of Wines of the World.  No one on my team had been to the Columbus Curling Club before, which has only been open at its new location for a few years.  We were all pleasantly surprised.  A charming place ... hard to imagine it had once been a warehouse! 

Courtney, Karen and Laurel

The ice was a bit challenging, very fast but some strange curls to it.  It took us awhile to get a read on the ice and we got behind in our first game.  We shook after 7 ends and wracked up a loss.  We took a break and were feted at the home of one of the Club members, a South American themed menu with accompanying Chilean wine.  That must have cleared our heads as we came back in our second game in the afternoon and handily won.

After curling concluded on Saturday, the Club hosted a wine tasting that evening, with different food pairings and tasty wines....  Laurel and I ended up the big winners in the raffle and our team won a prize for best song....  Good thing that wasn't recorded!

On Sunday, we won our final game and ended up the winner of the "B" event.  Prizes were bottles of wine (of course).



Me, Courtney, Laurel and Karen with our "trophies."

Columbus outdid themselves on a terrific event and we hope to return next year.

Curling Update - USCA Senior Nationals

Pardon the lag in posting.... but I've been busy curling!

First a quick report from the USCA Seniors, which were the first weekend in February in Bismarck, ND.  That weekend coincided with the worst snowstorm of the season that shut down a large portion of the country... nerve-wracking travel and one team from Maine cancelled due to the snow.  We also started the competition late in order to wait for all of the remaining six teams to arrive in one piece.

In a nutshell, the Capital Curling Club was a very nice facility with four sheets of ice.  We started strong, winning our first game against Wisconsin.  After that, our team struggled and we definitely did not play up to our potential.  We won one other game against North Dakota and lost to the eventual winner, Minnesota, as well as teams from Illinois and Washington.  We finished in a three-way tie at 2-3 with Wisconsin and Washington.  Since we had better scores for the draws to the button, we "officially" ended up in third place.

In between games we tasted some of the local food (deep fried cheese sandwiches!!) .....

And toured some of the sites.  It was pretty cold so mainly we stayed indoors!


My niece, Michelle, me and Sacajawea (the statute).

Overall, it was a good experience.  While my lucky socks didn't help us win more games, I will maybe give them a try at my next race to see if they work better when I'm running...


My lucky socks (although my Drymax socks are on underneath!)