Bowling at West Park

If you're looking for a fun outing, bowling two or three strings at the West Park Bowling Centre on Wellington Street West might be just the thing for you.

For a group of four, renting a lane for an hour will probably let you bowl two strings.

The lanes are behind and connected to Fil's Diner. This means you can have a round of coffee while you bowl or even a burger and fries.

On two recent daytime outings, Manon and I have been really impressed with the friendliness of the staff.

As for the other patrons, on a Saturday, we shared the alley with two groups of kids celebrating birthdays. They seemed to be having a good time, but we didn't interact with them much except for when one little guy went to roll his ball down our lane instead of his.

On a weekday, we were just finishing up around 1 pm when a group of retirees started coming in for what was clearly their regular league time. They looked like serious bowlers - some of them with the wrist braces you see pros wearing on TV. But they were a friendly bunch, asking us how we were doing and not one of them made fun of me for not breaking a hundred on my last string.

Another bonus at West Park is the modern automatic score-keeping system. I kind of miss filling in the scores with a pencil, but it cuts down on controversy and confusion. The cutting edge technology even has special graphics:

• for a spare: a big flashing slash
• for a strike: a big flashing X
• for a gutter ball: (a special treat for the other players, but not for you) a mocking cat!

My brother Paul demonstrates that you can't take the mocking cat personally