Activities in El Dorado

A family-owned emporium of alley-based athletics, Prairie Bowl combines the well-loved pleasures pin-pugilism and hot food to provide fuel and fun for every member of your familial strike force. After filling pie-shaped stomach vacancies with delicious slices of pizza, lace up and slip-slide out onto one of 16 lanes with up to three teammates to vie against one another for the title of best turkey-trotter. Saturdays are host to cosmic bowling, illuminated by black lights and set to hypnotic beats as bowlers toss their balls into an infinite void of milk bottle impersonators. Although not included in the Groupon, Prairie Bowl also boasts an arcade room to allow guests to reconnect with comforting un-reality, while late hours on Fridays and Saturdays make the alley a safe and friendly place to spend quality time with your brood until 1 a.m.

Spurred by a mutual dream of owning oodles of creatures out in the country, animal lovers Robert and Kathy Harris swung open the gates to Four Points Ranch and Petting Zoo in 2010. Today, the facility invites families onto its grounds to learn about the natural world while interacting and playing with a variety of furry, four-legged residents. For a quarter, guests receive a handful of grain to use in designated feeding areas, and can climb into some of the pens, where goats, sheep, and miniature horses wait to be patted on the back or spoken to in words of no fewer than five syllables. Face painting, inflatable play zones, and a fire pit for roasting s’mores accompany each visit to Four Points, which also hosts birthday parties and field trips and offers a mobile petting-zoo service.

In Prairie Trails Golf Course, the City of El Dorado has orchestrated an 18-hole layout that's welcoming to locals and out-of-towners alike. Water hazards and dense foliage hem in the bluegrass fairways, and the creeping bentgrass greens produce a true roll on high-pressure putts. After groups hole out and shake hands on the 18th green, they can head into the course grill to add up their strokes and toast whoever has the most irons over sandwiches and cold drinks.

Bermuda grass fairways and bent grass greens form the basis of a challenging layout at Augusta Country Club?s nine-hole golf course, which has blanketed the Kansas countryside since 1922. Every hole features two separate tee boxes, which means golfers can enjoy two distinct experiences of each hole when they play an 18-hole round. The opportunity to play the same holes twice also grants golfers a chance to redeem themselves by avoiding a bunker or water hazard the second time around. A waterway runs horizontally across the fairways on six different holes, forcing golfers to send shots over its glassy surface or tunnel underneath it with a makeshift shovel made from divot tools.

During your two-month membership ($78) at Anytime Fitness, you can re-bloom your wilted health with the state-of-the-art facility's diverse range of cardio and strength equipment. Exploit muscles for non-financial gain with free weights, tone legs on the treadmills, undergo a demanding tour de fitness center via exercise bikes, or just catch up on reruns of Homeboys from Outer Space with the gym's HDTV monitors. If the flawed workout plan you concocted yourself results only in frighteningly muscular ring fingers, one of Anytime's motivating personal trainers can prescribe a regimen designed to help you meet your fitness goals during two personal-training sessions ($50 each). When you've finished sculpting your flesh-statue, purify yourself of sweat and fried-cheese memories in Anytime's private restrooms and showers.

With machines set up in rows to encourage competition, many ordinary gyms cater to men's bodies and psychology, right down to the urinals that were "accidentally" installed in the women's locker room. At Curves, you'll move around a circuit of hydraulic resistance machines that have been designed to work with women's bodies and promote weight loss, protect against osteoporosis, and deal with arthritis. An experienced trainer is always nearby to help manage your machine maneuvering and your muscle making. Instead of fiddling with weight stacks and losing your momentum, the hydraulic machines use your body weight and fitness level to create resistance that matches your abilities, decreasing the risk of soreness or injury. Because traditional lift-and-lower motions create bulky muscles, each machine uses push-and-pull motions to create toned, lean muscles perfect for crushing a grapefruit without looking like you can.