Bowling

One of the few locked places on the island is the bowling alley.  It's only open Sunday nights from 7-9pm.  It's so odd and fun.  Most of the balls and pins are really old with lots of nicks and missing paint but it totally adds to the character of the place.  I don't even want to know how old some of the shoes are.  A few of the lanes don't work and some of them have pinsetters that don't always work properly and so you'll end up with pins already down even before you have thrown the ball.  When we played with the former volunteer Nik, we'd just count those pins in our score--Midway rules.  But when playing with others who take it more seriously we have to push the reset button to get the correct amount of pins to start with.  So much less exciting because you never knew what you'd get and sometimes the pins would start falling out even before the pin setter had landed.  Fun.  If it gets too annoying or something gets stuck, they'll shut off the lane and go in the back to fix it.  We got to go back there which was so cool but looked fairly dangerous and was super loud. 

The score sheets are fantastic and look like they are from the 50's or something.

 

Bowling's fun, even though I'm not very good at the actual bowling aspect of it.  I think I have a mental block because my mom married a pro-bowler for a while and he was kind of a douchebag so he tainted bowling a bit for me.  That sounds like a good excuse, right?  I joked about that to a few people the first night as an explanation for my poor bowling skills and so they suggested I picture his teeth as the pins and every time I do that I get a strike.

 

Almost every time we have been bowling a petrel has ended up flying into the bowling alley and stumbling onto a lane.  As I mentioned in a previous post, bonin petrels drink alcohol in their burrows all day, end up getting hammered and then come out at night and drunkenly fly into things.  I'm pretty sure they had to put up this sign in the bowling alley because of the petrels.