Petanque Anyone?

Before I get to today's topic, a few odds and ends.

Have you been to the blog site and voted on this week's poll yet? It looks to be a runaway election, but you still have time to exercise your franchise

Teri visited Paris yesterday on a scouting trip for our upcoming adventure. I may have proof for you in a few days (if we can figure out how to get a picture from her cell phone to my computer).

Unless one or more of my co-authors write some guest posts in my absence, the blog is going to be pretty quiet over the next few weeks. On Thursday I fly to Belize for a one week church mission trip. Wish me luck. I'll be painting a church building and playing "Uncle Zeke" in a series of VBS skits among other things. We'll also be visiting a prison, going to a couple of Belizian church services and who knows what all. My understanding is that we'll be working in a pretty slummy part of Belize City, which should be interesting

After I get back, I'll be home for all of one day before flying to Florida for a five day sales meeting (Steve will also be there for that one), so Teri isn't going to see much of me for a couple of weeks and I won't be very blogarific for a while.

Okay, on to today's subject.

The game of Pentanque (also known as Boules), is sort of a French national pastime. Go to any park in any French city on a nice day and you'll find a bunch of older French men (and French folks of all ages) playing the game. You'll see--this game really is a kind of national pastime, particularly for the aforementioned older men. Boules is similar to the Italian game Bocci and is played with metal balls.

It's kind of like a cross between bowling, marbles and horseshoes. I don't know the rules, but it's apparently a really simple game to learn and a very difficult game to master.

So I propose the following:

On our trip I'll try to acquire a Pentanque set (shouldn't be much of a challenge). And then one afternoon, lets find a park in whatever town we're parked in that day and hold a BYSAPC Pentanque Tournament. It should be hilarious and if my plan unfolds the way I imagine, we should draw a crowd of very amused native "coaches" to laugh at us and show us the proper way to play.

Here's a website that has a nice basic explanation of the game.

http://www.petanque.net.nz/Learning_to_play.html

So how about it. Who's up for a game of Petanque?