Friends from Ohio

Nelson watches the game while he and Bek wait to play

Our friends Shannon Hodge and Don E. Baker each promised Shirley sometime back that they would come down for a visit in July and help us with the "Introduction to Petanque" day we scheduled for Saturday, July 18th, at David Caldwell Historic Park (Tanger Bicentennial Gardens) in Greensboro.

True to their word, they each arrived in NC on the afternoon of July 14 to spend a few days with us in Lexington.  Since Shirley's birthday had been the day before, we started our time together with a birthday cake and ice cream Donnie brought down from his home in Dayton, Ohio.  Shannon had already arrived a couple of hours earlier from Zanesfield to help with the celebration.

The next day we took Donnie and Shannon with us to our weekly Wednesday morning play at Griffith Park in Winston-Salem.  Though our friends had each made long drives the day before, they made the sacrifice to start their day early in order for us to get all our petanque paraphernalia loaded, transported, and erected in order to begin play at 9:00 AM.  We have a LOT of stuff to carry in the summertime, since we need shade tents, water jugs, ice, etc. in addition to the usual scoreboards, circles, boules, snacks, rakes, and other odds and ends we provide.

Only Fred, Nelson, and Rebekah were able to join us on this particular Wednesday, but we still had quite a few closely contested games before the Carolina sun and everyone's lunchtime hunger pains ended our morning session around 1:30 PM.