Last night Maria and I inaugurated the 2004 World Series of Skee-ball at Salem Willows, which opened its Casino arcades this weekend. "The Willows" is the only place outside of Jersey that I've found the refurbished old Skee-ball machines that still use wooden balls. There are plenty of the game's plastic successor kicking around, but there's something about rolling a heavy oaken sphere that is quintessential to the experience. It was a split decision - I took three games out of the five rounds we played, but Maria rolled the high score for the night (290) not just once, but twice.
The best part of playing however was Andriana's reaction. She loved the lights and sounds of the arcade in general, but was fascinated with the Skee-ball machines themselves, and kept trying to pick up the wooden balls and hand them to her mother while she was rolling! She also was delighted by the steady stream of yellow tickets that emanated from the machine as we racked up higher and higher scores. The nice thing about the Casino is that they allow you to redeem the tickets for prizes - granted, they're pretty rinky-dink for a night's winnings, but we thought this year we'd save our tickets up and use them to get something big for Andriana at the end of the summer.
(Though to be perfectly honest, she'd probably just be happy chewing on all of those tickets!)
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