We went out for a meal at Rancho Blanco’s last night and we all had a great time.

 

 

Dad had consumed a bottle of wine in the afternoon and a number of brandies at Rancho’s and so we were set up for a good night’s entertainment.

The previous night, we had all played poker. Mum and Dad weren’t too au fait with the rules so we had a trial round and then decided to play for real (poker chips, not real money).

Dad went a bit over the top with his betting and I ended up winning the hand and a stackful of his chips.

Dad:- Right, well, that was a practice hand. Let’s start now properly.

Well, we were in stitches at dad’s cunning manipulation of another practice round. This became the in-joke for tonight’s game at every round he had a bad hand.

But, the entertainment didn’t stop there. Tonight’s game was “Hearts” and dad was keeping score. In hindsight, that was obviously not the best idea. In “Hearts”, the lower your score, the better you are playing and every round of the game all the points people have should add up to 127.

So, after half an hour and a few rounds, we took a look at the scores and it didn’t make sense at all. None of the hands added up correctly and he had given Karen 100 points to help her out, but forgetting that points are bad in “Hearts”. We were entertained !

I took over the scoring and we had a couple of normal uneventful hands until it was Dad’s turn to deal. We were supposed to have 8 cards each, but we all had 6 apart from Karen who had 12 cards. At which point Mum decided to take dad back to the hotel.

LOL

And then to top of the evening’s entertainment, dad locked the garage on the way to the car, he toddled off to the car and couldn’t see mum at the car.

Dad (coming back to the villa) :- I think I have locked your mum in the garage.

We were in stitches, especially when we heard mum laughing at dad. She hadn’t been locked in the garage, but was putting rubbish in the outside bin and was following dad up the drive.

A real fun packed night.

Not to end on a downer, but it’s something I should put in the blog. Karen used to know how to play hearts and she was a good player. But tonight, she couldn’t seem to grasp the rules at all and was playing all the wrong cards. She wasn’t down about it at all, and she provided nearly as much entertainment as dad at some of the cards she put down.

In “Hearts” you don’t want to end up with any hearts in a hand you win. And hearts can’t be led until someone else has had to put one down. Karen led an ace of hearts.

1-Against the rules and

2-She would end up winning lots of hearts (a bad thing)

Mum:- You can’t lead a heart Karen

Karen took the Ace of hearts back and put a 8 of hearts down.

She clearly was struggling to play it. It was quite sad, but she was laughing at herself, so we didn’t let it get us down and joined in the frivolities.

A cracking night overall !