There *will* be curling in Vermont this fall!

Longtime readers will know that one of the bugs I caught from living in Ottawa for five years was a love of the sport of curling.  One of the disappointing aspects of our move to Vermont was that there are no curling clubs in Vermont, which was a bit hard to take after playing the sport ever Monday night for four years at a club in Westboro (Ottawa) about five minutes away from our house there.  The good news for me has been connecting with a group of people who curl up at a club in Quebec (2 hours away from Burlington) and who are working to bring curling into Vermont.

The even better news is that we now will be able to curl in Vermont this year!  Granted, it is "arena ice"[1] so we'll have to set up and take down each time and the playing surface will be a bit different than that of a dedicated curling facility, but hey, it is actually in Vermont and so we have a far better chance of attracting people to workshops and building up a curling community within the state.  Ultimately, it would be great to have a dedicated facility but this next season gives both us and the Morrisville facility a chance to gauge the level of interest within the region.  Hopefully it will be strong and turn out to be something that the Morrisville facility will continue to offer.... and hopefully we can build enough interest to start up other efforts within other parts of Vermont as well.  We'll see...  in the meantime, it will just be darn nice to have somewhere to go curling that is closer than going up into Quebec!

[1] i.e. we are using an ice arena that is used for hockey, skating, etc.  For our time on the ice, the rink crew runs their Zamboni across and smoothes it all down.  We then install the hacks, scribe the lines for the house, move the rocks out, pebble the surface, etc. - and then put it all away when our time is done.  There are techniques now to make the ice very usable for curling and so clubs that are starting out very often go this route as it is a whole lot less expensive than maintaining your own dedicated facility.