Day 4 - Forfar
Upon arrival at the Forfar Curling Club located at Forfar Indoor Sports, the Tourists were greeted by a bagpiper and a guard of honor with curling brooms.
The Forfar is an amazing facility that houses a 4-sheet dedicated Curling facility, 2 additional curling sheets that are shared with ice skating and 6 Bowls (Lawn Bowling) sheets? Lanes? Not quite sure what the playing field of Bowls is called.
The Scottish Curling Club model is a bit different from the U.S. model in that an individual facility will have multiple clubs curling at it. I may not be 100% accurate but I believe that Forfar Indoor Sports has 42 Curling Clubs, ranging widely in sizes. From perhaps 80+ members down to 8 members. At the start of the season, each club requests their ice time from the facility and may end up with ice time on a Tuesday night, a Friday afternoon and a Sunday morning and then no ice time for the next fortnight. The concept is based upon the fact that there were a wide variety of clubs curling on individual Curling ponds before dedicated facilities were built and they wanted to remain as separate clubs in order to retain the history and tradition of their clubs which date back 100+ years.
The Forfar Curling Facility also holds the Royal Caledonian Curling Club as the reigning champions of “The Grand Match”. The Grand Match is an epic outdoor Curling match between the North and South of Scotland. The Grand Match has been held 38 times over the last couple of centuries and has had as many as 20,000 attendees. The last Grand Match was held in 1979 and was won by the Edzell Curling Club which curls out of the Forfar Curling Center today. They will hold the trophy below until the next Grand Match, but that might mean that they hold in forever, since due to health and safety issues, they are unlikely to be ever be able to hold such an event on a frozen loch again.
Finally, the Forfar Curling Center is the home of Hailey Duff, who won the Gold Medal in the 2022 Winter Olympics, playing Lead on Team Muirhead.
The Forfar Curling Center is one of those facilities that I have seen in the past but haven’t previously visited where they have mirrors above the far houses to give the players a view of the placement of rocks in the far houses.
The Tourists quickly got onto the ice for Draw 1 against the Angus Region.
Draw 1
The curlers were piped out onto the ice for draw 1 and given a wee dram of whisky.
The video of the Tourists being piped onto the ice can be found here:
Overall in the morning draw, USA scored 28 points and Scotland scored 23 point.
That put the total at USA 57 and Scotland at 48.
After Draw 1, the Tourists were treated to a tasty dinner and gifted a book called “Celebrating Curling - The Roaring Game”
Draw 2
After lunch, the Tourists played against the North and South Esk Province Teams. They were piped onto the ice as they were in the morning.
The wonderful ladies at the Forfar Curling Club took it upon themselves to clean the Herries-Maxwell Trophy for us. Thank you ladies for making the trophy look even better.
A wonderful dinner was served by the Forfar Curling club, the Tourists regaled their hosts with their 3 songs and multiple stories and the evening was “mostly” wrapped up with some bar games including a game similar to Card Shark and the Solo Cup Stacking Game.
The evening was only “mostly” wrapped up because two of the Tourists chose to hang around at the Forfar Indoor Sports facility and play indoor Bowls. Bowls, also called Lawn Bowling, is a game in which players roll biased balls so that they roll close to a smaller ball named a “Jack”. It is sort of a combination between Curling and Bocce Ball.
The Tourists retired to the Apex Hotel in Dundee.
The Tourists travels to date:
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