Duckpin bowling!

Carl and I have each enjoyed bowling in the past, but both think that regular 10-pin bowling might be difficult for our aging shoulders and knees. I suggested that we look for duckpin bowling -- which Carl had not heard of previously -- because they use smaller, lighter-weight balls. Unfortunately, when we tried to find a duckpin bowling alley, we found that they were very limited in locations across the country, so we had put it on the back burner.

It happened that when we were driving to the Harvest Host where we planned to stay Friday night, we drove past a bowling alley that indicated that it had duckpin bowling -- and it was just a mile or so from the Harvest Host location.

Entering the bowling alley

The lanes are the same length and width, but the pins and balls are smaller.

We tried using the multi-step technique for launching the ball, but we didn't have a lot of success...

... and "body-English" to try to influence the ball to go a different way after it was on its way down the alley accomplished very little!

Duckpin balls in the rack. The process of bowling (at least at this alley) was a lot more manual. The pins were set by the machine. You could throw 3 balls (one at a time) to try to get all of the pins down. As in 10-pin, if you got all down with the first ball, you got a strike; all down at the second ball -- a spare; and different from 10-pin, if you got them all down on the third ball, you just got 10. You had to count the number of pins yourself (the machine didn't reset them between each ball and give you a count or automatically score it). Once you had bowled 3 balls (or gotten all 10 pins down), you pressed the "reset" button, and the machine cleared the pin-space and set the 10 duckpin pins in place for the next bowler.

Carl determined that walking up to the line and throwing the ball was just as effective as a 4-step approach. Both of us had difficulty controlling the ball -- we were not able to put a spin on the ball like the finger-holes in a 10-pin ball allow.

We each had a couple of good frames!

Here's a video of one of Carl's shots: https://youtube.com/shorts/Gjwp5IypsjE

Our final scores

We only bowled one game -- it was fun, but we didn't really feel that we had it "figured out"! The bowling alley had some 10-pin lanes too, but we decided we'd better not subject our bodies to any more un-used-to exercise at this point!