Crazy Golf

03/05/18

I was at home this week so I visited my home unit for their meeting. This week was local elections in the UK so we couldn't use our usual hall as it is a polling station. Instead, we headed out to a local indoor crazy golf course.

All the girls arrived and we collected in their forms and ticked them off on a register while Brown Owl checked us in and found out how it all worked. You had to go round in a group of 6 or less so we got the girls to get into groups of 5 or 6. Some of the Young Leaders and the Guide Helper wanted to play so we put them with the groups of 5 and then had a Leader who didn't want to play with each group to keep score. There were two different routes that the girls could take and each group headed off into one or the other. Brown Owl was the only leader who wasn't with a specific group and wandered between them all checking up on everyone and doing toilet runs.

In my group, I had a few girls who I didn't know so I did a quick name check and wrote them all on the score card and then headed in. The girls had some interesting techniques for playing golf, including one girl who was a hockey player and kept pushing the ball along with the club instead of hitting it. There was also a lot of stopping balls with feet and nudging them into position which I mostly ignored as they were quite a young group, although I did occasionally stop them when it got a bit too much and reminded them that in golf you have to hit it and let it roll! There were also a couple of holes where you had to hit the ball hard and straight to get it up a slope and so I let them have a few goes and if they couldn't do it then they could put it at the top and carry on.

For the first few holes, we were following a group around who weren't associated with us. We would usually finish our hole just before they finished theirs and the girls would all watch them play their last few shots. They were quite good humoured about the girls 'encouragement', although you could tell that they really had wanted a nice evening out with some drinks and not a hoard of small girls following them round! At one point, we caught up with them at a hole where you hit it up a slope and through one of 4 holes which was then a tunnel to another section. I assumed that this tunnel was to some sort of basket for the next hole and so once they had moved on, we started playing on that hole. What I didn't realise was that the tunnel came out in the second half of the hole, which they were still playing and our balls kept flying out at them! Once we realised, we stopped and let them finish before carrying on with our game. A hole or two later they then decided to go back to the bar for a break and let us get ahead of them. We then didn't see them until we were playing the last hole and they were on the one next to us. When our girls had finished, they were going over and giving them 'tips' on how to do the hole! I eventually managed to pull the girls away and leave the poor people in peace.

Once we had finished, the girls had bought some money and they could get an ice cream or a drink while we waited for everyone else to finish and parents to arrive. One girl didn't have any money and wasn't going to have anything but then another girl offered to buy her an ice cream which we thought was very kind of her.

Overall, I think our girls really enjoyed themselves, even if they weren't very good at the actual golf part - in my group, the par for the route we did was 40 and we had scores ranging from 67 to 111! If you have one of these in the area, I would definitely recommend going, although I have to say that ours is more like mini golf than crazy golf, as there are none of the stereotypical going through tunnels and under bridges that I associate with crazy golf.