Take a leap of fun at ZONE BOWLING!

2020 is a Leap Year, which means an extra day in February to have some fun! And when ZONE BOWLING has fun, we tend to spread the love around. Here’s why you’re going to love Leap Year at ZONE BOWLING this year...

Leap Day only comes once every four years, and adds some mystery to the month of February. It also begs these questions: If you were born on 29 February, do you even exist? And are you only allowed to celebrate your birthday every four years?!?

Our answer to that is simple: hell to the no! Every day is an excuse to party in our books, and if it’s not your actual birthday, make like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland and celebrate your UnBirthday! We’re making it easy, too: our special Leap Deal package runs all the way from 1 Feb to 29 Feb, just because we can.

For only $29 (see what we did there?), your Leap Deal Includes:

• Two games of bowling and/or laser tag
• Shoe hire
• 30 Minutes Time Play (red and yellow swipers)
• 300 Powertickets
• $10 Café Voucher
• $8 Return Pass

That’s something to celebrate, right? Now find out a bit more about Leap Year below...

Catching up with the sun

Basically, we need to add an extra day every four years to balance the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar (the way we keep track of dates and days and weeks and months and years...) and the actual solar year. Why? Because it takes the Earth a little bit less than 365 ¼ days (365.242 days) to orbit the Sun, which means every four years we have an extra day’s worth of time we have to squeeze in somewhere. The extra day, “Leap Day”, is added to the end of February, giving it 29 days instead of 28.

Popping the question

Through the ages, Leap Days have been seen as special for various reasons, often upending the normal routine of things. One example is women being “allowed” to ask men to marry them on Leap Days. Terribly old-fashioned, we know! But it was (and still is in some places) an actual thing: the idea of Leap Year was found so ridiculous in the 1500s that a British play was written that poked fun at it. The play joked that the extra day should be a “day when women should trade their dresses for breeches” and act like men. (Ha. Ha.)

It was satire, but did inspire some early feminists: by the 1700s, women were using Leap Day to propose to the men in their lives. The tradition peaked in the early 1900s, and continues in the UK, where some retailers even offer discount packages to women popping the question.

At ZONE BOWLING, though, we fully believe that anyone can ask their significant other for their hand in marriage at any time, and that no one has to wait for a “special day” just because of their gender! So if you’re looking to pop the question or want to hurry your significant other up a bit, Leap Day is your chance... Even better: take the knee at ZONE BOWLING and make our day!

Witches be warned

How’s this for creepy? The Salem witchcraft trials are connected to Leap Day. These horrible witch hunts played off in Massachusetts in the USA, and the first warrants for the arrest of so-called “witches” went out on February 29, 1692. Not a good extra day at all... Especially since most of the “witches” that were trialled and executed were just regular women who sometimes spoke their minds, knew their herbs from their weeds and were a bit different from the norm.

So, about birthdays...

A certain guy called James Milne Wilson (eighth premier of Tasmania – know your history!) was born on a Leap Day. And then, he died on one, too: on 29 February 1880, he passed away at the young age of 17. (Well, 68 in regular people years!) Apparently, this does not happen often at all.

Another thing: if you ARE born on a Leap Day, consider yourself rather special… The odds of being born on February 29th is 1 in 1,461, which makes it particularly rare for one “leapling” (as these special creatures are called) to meet another. But how’s this for even weirder: the Henriksen family of Norway had three children in the 1960s – all of them born four years apart, on consecutive Leap Days! Talk about timing...

But wait, there’s more...

If you’re a Swede or a Hobbit, you might have actually experienced February the 30th. In the case of Hobbits, they get to celebrate it because they’re fictional and can do whatever they please (their creator, J.R.R. Tolkien, gave them twelve 30-day months every year, okay). If you were a Swede lucky enough to be alive in Finland in the 1712s, though, you would have experienced an EXTRA Leap Day added to February, to help their outdated Julian calendar to catch up with the new Gregorian calendar. (Yes, we have been using the Gregorian calendar since the 1700s. Anybody have a better idea?)

Lucky or unlucky?

People have been debating for ages whether a Leap Year is lucky or lucky. The Scottish people even have a saying: “leap year was ne’er a good sheep year”. While a clear winner hasn’t been determined, it does impact different people in different ways, depending on context. If you’re a prisoner with a one-year sentence, for example, it’s bad luck if your sentence spans a Leap Day. If you work on a fixed annual salary, you don’t get extra pay for the extra day! (Serious bummer!) But you also don’t have to pay an extra day’s rent if your rent is fixed...

And, of course, at ZONE BOWLING Leap Year means extra fun and great deals, which is definitely lucky! So rustle up your friends, family and colleagues, and come celebrate the Leap Year with us!