Texas adventure

Brian Wilson

Sometimes you have to go away to appreciate what you have in your own backyard.

That point was hit home to me recently when I traveled to Texas while on vacation over the holidays. My curling teammates and I rented a van from Medford Motors and drove to Austin to compete in the 2023 Hogmanay Bonspiel hosted by the Lonestar Curling Club.

Considering that the Medford Curling Club is roughly six blocks from my home, driving more than 1,300 miles across parts of seven states, in the middle of winter may seem a bit excessive. This is especially so since our team had no expectation of placing highly in the tournament.

In many ways, the trip was an excuse to visit my brother Tom, who relocated with his family to the Austin area a few years ago and who is the one who pointed out the nearby club. Despite having no other curling experience, Tom joined us in the bonspiel as my team’s lead.

Like many clubs outside of the upper-midwest, Austin’s curling club is in a shared facility with a local hockey rink and they play year-round. In the curling world this is known as arena ice versus the dedicated ice that we are used to here in Medford. Their facility reminded me how lucky we are to have such excellent venues here with the Simek Center and the Medford Curling Club.

We loaded up the van and set out on the road on December 27 driving through the night to get to Austin by mid-afternoon the next day. Since we didn’t have our first game until the afternoon of the 29th, this gave us some time to sit outside by my brother’s pool and soak up some of the sunshine and warmth and drive an hour each way to go visit a gas station. With temperatures close to 70 degrees with clear blue skies at the end of December, it is understandable why many people are moving there. The gas station in question was a Buc-ee’s and is roughly the size of a large shopping center if the parking lot was filled with gas pumps instead of parking stalls and there was an entire deli-counter of specialty jerky being served and a person in a giant beaver costume is walking around getting their picture taken with people.

A fun fact about Austin is that from spring to early fall it is the home of the country’s largest urban population of bats, which apparently hang out under the bridges in the downtown. We found this out when we asked the bonspiel organizers what was up with the bat in this club’s logo.

I wish we could say we used our superior Wisconsin curling skills and abilities to cut through the competition. The truth is the way we played in the first game had me questioning if I should burn my broom and take up tiddlywinks. In fairness to my teammates, the ice was incredibly slow and it took us a long time to adjust. We were throwing rocks that would have gone through the back wall of the Medford club and coming up short of the hog line. Beyond that, we just weren’t playing that well and curling gods seemed against us even getting any lucky rolls. It also helped that my teammate reminded me that curling was basically just the excuse for a group of 50-something year old guys to go on an epic road trip and hang out with my brother. It is good to have that perspective.

About the only people to have any success in the Friday night draws were from the local club teams who were used to playing on that ice. The ice crew went to work early Saturday and by the time of our second draw, the ice was was greatly improved and while still slower than what we were used to, at least allowed us to feel like we knew how to play the game.

We ended up winning that round against a team from Las Vegas and scored well in the tie-breaker to decide which semifinal teams advanced. We lost our third game against a team from Texas, which included a curler from Michigan.

Thanks to the strength of our tie-breaker we ended up in the semifinal for Event C. Which is actually better than we anticipated. The team we were against was from the Broomstones Curling Club near Boston, Mass. The game was very competitive and went into an extra end with their skip making an excellent shot with the hammer stone to get the win.

We started the drive home on New Years day and my teammates dropped me and my suitcase off at my office so that I could go to work and get the January 4 paper put to bed.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.