Here in New York we’ve hit that part of the year when it gets wet and
windy and bloody hard to get motivated to get outside and get moving.
As soon as the air got crisp and the leaves turned, I was on the couch
in my cardigan.
Then I headed up to Connecticut for a
country-inn weekend, and found a sport I could totally get into. Well,
maybe calling it a “sport” is a bit rich, but let’s not nitpick, it did
get me moving. It’s called boules. Also known as pétanque. In other
words: bowling. (But in French it sounds so much more glamorous, no?)
Similar
to bocce (which I know from a few of my local Brooklyn bars), boules is
the laziest, most addictive activity I’ve tried in a long time. When my
friend Brekke and I first hit the boulodrome at the
Bee and Thistle Inn
in Old Lyme, Connecticut, I had a flashback to The Secret Life of Us.
Remember the hipster-resurgence of lawn bowls that took hold of
Australia back in 2001? Right. Well, this was nothing at all like that.
Not a schooner of Toohey’s in sight.
Never having played
boules before, we were given a quick lesson by innkeepers Linnea and
David Rufo, and then launched straight into a game. I’d like to recount
the rules and procedures for you, but frankly, it took about seven or
eight rounds for Brekke and I to catch on to what was happening. (The
order of who tosses the boules, how we scored points, etc.) We blamed
our opponents, since they’d treated us to a yummy tasting menu with
about five different wines the night before and our heads were still
foggy. (Hmm, their boules strategy revealed!)
The bit we do
remember is that you have to get your boules closest to the little
marker—and you can knock other people’s boules out of the way. Once we
got into the swing of it, we were hooked. We were especially partial to
the part where you got to exclaim, “Nice boule!”
Linnea and
David play regularly—with famous chef Jacques Pépin, no less. They
regaled us with stories of downing bottles of rosé during games, and
the losers having to “kiss the fanny” (It means “bum” here, don’t
forget! There’s a wooden carving in the shape of a butt kept close to
the boulodrome precisely for this purpose.)
The best part of
boules is that it allows for different styles of throwing or tossing
the boules (some lob it gently, others chuck it like a shot put), and
there’s plenty of time to chat between turns. The first team to score
13 points is the winner—and what do you know, Brekke and I beat the
innkeepers (but we couldn’t bring ourselves to tell them to kiss the
fanny.) Feeling very pleased with ourselves, we decided that our
strenuous morning of sport must be followed up with a post-workout cool
down. And at the Bee and Thistle that means curling up in front of the
fire, and subjecting yourself to a massage. Nice boule!