This Sundays tour was supposed to be Bayside Breeze, but the powers that be in the upper echelons of the Planet HQ decided that variety is the spice of life (or at least it’s less insipid half cousin) and that it was time to try something new, something dynamic, something just a little bit more adventurous. With this in mind, a new destination was proposed, one that rewards skill, precision and dexterity and doesn’t penalise you for having arthritic hips. Yes, we were going to play lawn bowls, a sport not so much for your generation X’s as your generation XXC’s. Don your flat caps; break out the Sanatogen, this week, we were going to Windsor!

With the Planet ski excursion having returned the day before, Monte, Vaughan and Suzy joined the gathering group and regaled us with tales of snow, snowboarding, bruising (mainly Suzy) and spending long periods driving a car when you’re tired. Fully up to speed on the best rest stops between here and Thredbo, we were ready to set off. Monte was sporting a swanky set of new skates with wheels so big they wouldn’t look out of place on earth moving equipment. He was going to be leading proceedings with assistance from Julie, Vaughan, Pat and Amber.

We headed out to the Coronation Street bike path before cutting across town to the Roma Street Parklands. Eschewing the hill in favour of the escalator, a small group of us arrived at the celebration lawn and stopped to wait for the others. As the minutes ticked by, they seemed to be taking awfully long time to catch up. Never mind, the large expanse of smooth flat concrete in front of us proved to be the perfect place to practice three turns, “backwards movement” and sundry other manoeuvres. After ten minutes, we decided something was amiss and Monte called Julie who informed him that they were waiting up the road and were wondering where we had got too. It seems that they'd somehow skated right past us without us so much as noticing. We set off and were soon reunited as a single group once again.

As we exited Roma Street Parklands, we stopped for another rest break and Amber turned her attention to the glide angle on Monte’s new skates. Applying a speed skating rule, she adjusted the frame position to maximise the attainable thrust per square foot pound of pressure applied. It all sounded very technical and ensured Monte got the most from his new 90mm wheels.

We were soon making tracks again and after one final rest stop at the BP garage it wasn’t long before we arrived at the Windsor Bowls club where we met up with Lyndal and Michelle. Thus we were ready to engage in an afternoon’s leisurely lawn bowling. Of course, leisurely is a comparative term and even a sport as relaxed as bowling can take on a hard edged competitive side if you take it seriously enough.

On the 22nd April 1921 the mayor of Windsor Town council, Bob Lane, called a meeting of interested citizens wanting to form a bowls club. The twenty four people present passed the motion unanimously and a club was formed at its present location of 69 Blackmore Street. Bob Lane was elected the foundation president and the greens were first open for play on 22nd May 1922 with an initial membership of seventy seven people.

Eighty two years later and a motley assortment of Planet Inline members were standing on the Paul Maggs Green being given a brief rundown on the art of lawn bowling. Paul Maggs incidentally seems to have been a prominent member of the Queensland Bowling Association in the late 1940’s. After being enthusiastically introduced to the technical terminology of bowling and having the weighted dynamics of an asymmetrical ball explained to us, we were unleashed onto the green as two teams comprising four groups of three. Having never picked up a bowling ball before the whole experience was new to me. Armed with a working knowledge of Newton’s second law of motion I figured it couldn’t be any harder than calculating the trajectory of a planetary body or the launch velocity of an orbital space ship. What a basic knowledge of physics doesn’t imbue you with however, is the quintessential lawn bowling skill of rolling the ball really, really gently! Unlike ten pin bowling where brute force can often be your friend, in lawn bowling anything more than the gentlest of releases will see your ball veering off towards the gutter at alarming speed. No wonder this is a game so beloved of the older generation, it requires a deft touch so gentle that rheumatism would be a positive benefit!

As ball after ball overshot the kitty (the small white ball which I thought was called a jack but obviously not in this half of the world), I was beginning to think this was not my game. Suzy, on the opposing team, who had earlier been protesting that she didn’t want to play, was having a much better time. Possessing all the qualities of a ringer she was placing the majority of her shots on target or to use the correct parlance, she had good weight and bias. This was the one time my “power” delivery actually came in useful. Taking careful aim, I sent my ball down the green at high speed, sending Suzy’s carefully placed ball scuttling off into the gutter. While this was a tactic that seemed to work rather successfully, it was deemed to be a little unsporting and not overly encouraged.

As the game progressed, it was obvious that some people were taking it far more seriously than others. At one end of the spectrum, Monte and Lyndal were playing to international bowling standards, invoking obscure rules and taking disputes to arbitration while at the other end Pat and Amber sauntered from one game to the next wondering what all the fuss was about. Everyone else slotted somewhere between these two extremes.

As the afternoon wore on, the bright blue sky began to darken on the horizon. It wasn’t long before a huge angry storm cloud obscured the sun and it was obvious that heavy rain was imminent. We quickly wrapped up our final games and decided that skating back was out of the question. As thunder bellowed in the distance, the train was the obvious mode of transport to get us back to the city. We quickly donned our skates and after a round of thankyous for an enjoyable afternoons bowling, we congregated in the car park. Lyndal and Michelle had their cars and gave Monte and Suzy a lift home. The rest of us made a quick dash to the Windsor train station (ticket vending machine number 706, 64 car parks, 14 meters above sea level) and within minutes we were all on the train heading for the South Bank stop.

Between getting on the train and arriving at South Bank, the heavens had opened up and deposited enough rain to leave the roads soaking wet. With skates having to be removed to get on the train and South Bank having an open platform, there was no way of avoiding the rain strewn tarmac. Making the quick dash from the train to the nearest undercover seat, even on tiptoe, involved large quantities of water being drawn into everyone’s absorbent footwear. Looking round revealed wincing faces as we pulled our boots over our soggy socks. With people heading off in various directions, we said our goodbyes and skated gingerly in the direction of home.

Normally, that would be the end of the story, but on this particular day, I was without a car. This meant I now had to skate the couple of kilometres from South Bank to Toowong. In the dry, this wouldn’t even illicit a mention, but in the wet it was a whole new adventure. Slipping and sliding along, small steps were the order of the day. I had got all the way to the foot bridge at Toowong Village without incident and was feeling pretty confident that I was going to make it home without any problems. I had skated up one side of the bridge, crossed the centre span and was now proceeding down the other side. Halfway down the first section of the descent, I applied the brake. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. I looked down. Polished tiles. Oh s**t. I was now heading rapidly to the scene of the accident and what’s worst, I had an audience. With nothing else for it, I had to adopt the emergency braking procedure. Falling onto all fours had virtually no effect on my decent velocity as the hard plastic of the pads offered even less resistance than the brake. Things came to a head (almost literally) as the concrete wall finally offered an element of retardation that had so far been sadly lacking. Ending up in a dishevelled, soggy heap at the bottom of the bridge, a line of inquiring faces appeared over the top of wall wanting to know if I required any kind of medical assistance. Quickly jumping up, I replied that there was “nothing to see here, please move along” and then looked down at the second half of the bridge with a sinking feeling. There was a run off on this part, but there was no way I could stop if anyone got in the way. With my audience now dispersing, I waited a second for a couple of people to clear the bottom of the ramp and then pushed off as gently as possible. I emerged from the bottom of the ramp and slithered to a halt with the least effective t-stop ever. I had made it down but learned a valuable lesson in the process. Wet tiles and skates don’t mix! I won’t be trying that route in the wet again any time soon.

All in all, a bit of an ignominious end to a fun days sk8ing and bowling.