Willing Spring to Come

This winter has been painful.  Aside from the 80+ inches of snow we got, it's been so cold and windy throughout March and into April that I'm beginning to believe winter will never end.  EVER.  I've been willing spring to come--refusing to wear my heavy winter coat (I've been layering underneath my fall/spring jacket), pulling out my fun and funky spring/summer sandals and heels, even getting pedicures in March with Cindy was a signal to spring that it was welcome to come around.

Seriously, this is what I woke up to on April 1st:

April Fool's, suckers!

But alas, none of this is working.  To the point that a colleague who was born and raised in Boston commented that this winter has been so bad and has lasted so long that its enough to drive someone out of New England. 

Wow.  I expect a comment like that from me, but not from a lifer.

Of course by now you know that one of Dave's and my favorite warm weather activities is mini golf.  And I'm eager to continue the dominance that I relished in last season, what with my holes in one and beating Dave on more than one occasion (yes, beating him twice is considered dominance in my world.  As my dad says, you're only as good as your last game).

At Christmas-time, I'd noticed that our local mall had replaced the Gap/Gap Kids store with an indoor Glow Golf course.  Very intriguing.  While we had no interest in checking it out during winter break (mall rats and all), we kept saying that we should go do it sometime.  Finally, we decided that it might be an indicator to the Spring gods that we were ready if we did some mini golf.  So we went to the mall the other night and started our season early.

Guess what?  If you go to the mall on a school night after dinner, there won't be as many mall rats to annoy you.  In fact, there won't be anyone at all in the glow golf.

We had the place to ourselves and it was a pretty good set up.  They actually have 2 eighteen hole courses that wrap throughout the two stores (the stores adjoined in the middle) and for $9 each, we could do both courses and then if we wanted to, we could pick our favorite and do it again.  It's like less than 17 cents a hole.  Awesome date night value.  Although the clerk told us they had apparently run out of the little pencils so we weren't able to keep score.  Not necessarily a bad thing.

That dark circle thing in the middle of this hole is a loop-the-loop (two side by side).  And it's metal.  And when you miss the lead into it and hit the side, it makes a very loud noise.  Every time you hit it.

You know what's hard?  Mini golf in the dark.  Well, it wasn't entirely dark, because the glowing aspects were quite bright and neon.  And the course was hard.  They had a lot of stuff in the way (I know that's the point, but I mean there was A LOT of stuff on the greens in the worst places).  Plus, since it was dark, seeing the slight dips and bumps was very difficult.  And even the holes that didn't have a lot of obstacles required a 180 degree turn to get remotely close to the pin. 

The good news is that I got a hole-in-one on the second hole.  The bad news is that I was otherwise terrible.  The first course was a disaster--I probably mulligan-ed my first shot of the tee on at least 7 of the holes.  Dave had some do-overs, but wasn't quite as awful as me.  In the end we both ended up with two holes-in-one, but I know on the first course, he probably beat me by 10.  The second course was better and I think we were more evenly matched.  We opted not to take them up on the offer to play our favorite course again.

I don't know if we'll go back--I don't think I could tolerate it had there been a bunch of people.  And it would have been slow going if there were children.  But we did have fun, mostly laughing at how bad we were.  Maybe we were just rusty--after all, it's been months since we played.  Either way, we had a good time. And since we didn't keep score, I was able to convince Dave that I beat him and made him buy me ice cream at Dairy Queen when we were through.