2008.05.10. - Boating, Golfing and "I-Screaming"

The early summer which reached us more than 2 weeks ago still sticks around.
Clear blue sky, sunshine with temperatures up to 28 degrees and no raindrop in sight put us into holiday-mood and on the road again.

We headed to the recreation area at the "Steinbrücker Teich" just outside of Darmstadt in Oberwaldhaus.

We got right down to Golfing and because the majority of our participants was under the age of 10 we chose the miniature version of the real thing, minigolf.

Our team was highly motivated and very competitive.





They all tried hard - still Norbert and I were not totally convinced about this being the main reason for ever decreasing number of strokes needed to get the ball into the holes - especially in cases when they played on their own!

Anyway, we were all challenged, had fun and so became the winners of the game after all!


By the way, in Germany there are several thousand minigolf courses and supposedly 15 million Germans play at least one round of minigolf during each year.


In 1867 in Scotland women had become interested in golf game but the conservative social norms of the era deemed it unacceptable for women to publicly perform such violent movements that a golf swing requires. Therefore an 18-hole course of short putting greens was constructed for women in St Andrews – apparently the first "miniature golf course" in the world.


After the heat of the game we headed for the lake. We were not the only ones.......the kids definitely envied their feathered friends who could swim and dive as much as they wanted to.
Did you know that the word duck came from the verb "to duck" meaning "to bend down low as if to get under something" or "to dive", because of the way ducks feed by upending -> Germanic languages still have similar words for "duck": for example Dutch eend, German ente.

Everybody did some exercise and made others who happened to be in the same boat wet (I mean particularly Daniel rowing my boat!).


Happy end is the best end of all stories - so we decided to round off this trip with an ice-cream for everyone!

















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