A couple of weeks ago @mrsbozz and I went on a camping trip. While normally our camping adventures take us in a northerly direction, on this occasion I thought it might be fun to try out luck heading south.
Just a little west of Michigan's capitol Lansing, there is a vast stretch of small farming communities. Amidst those communities is the town of Ionia. The Ionia State Recreation Area sits just a little bit outside town and is a pretty massive natural area. That's not what this post is about though, so you are going to have to check back for more info on that.
Instead, what this post is about is the fact that the Ionia park has a disc golf course on it and during out trip, @mrsbozz agreed to go disc golfing with me.
We played the front nine of twenty four holes and since we did our fair share of walking on this humid Friday morning, I am going to include this as a #wednesdaywalk post sponsored by @tattoodjay.
As you can imagine, I was over the moon when @mrsbozz agreed to go with me. She swears she has been disc golfing with me before, but I honestly can't remember that occasion. If that tells you how long it has probably been.
Typically when we are camping we get up in the morning and take a walk around the campground. She decided this would be a good substitute for that and tagged along with me. Luckily I have enough spare discs that she was able to use several of mine since she doesn't have her own.
The campground area of the park is about two miles back in the woods while the disc golf course is up near the front of the park. Because of that, we had to drive up to our destination and park the truck before we started playing.
The course could be really nice, but it needs to be kept up a little more. As you will see in some of the later photos, there is a lot of overgrowth that they have kind of allowed to get out of control. We actually had to skip hole 8 because it had a very narrow lane to throw and then you had to get over an inlet of the lake to get to the basket.
It looked like a sure way to loose a disc to me, so we said "nope".
Then you had holes like this that were wide open and amazing. The only complaint I have is that we went so early in the morning there was still a heavy dew on the ground. Our socks and shoes were drenched by the time we completed the first nine holes.
Thankfully, we didn't need them the rest of the day so we just let them dry in the sun at our campsite.
Session Lake is a dammed river that runs through the middle of the park. It's pretty clearly the main draw for a lot of people who visit this park. It has a very large beach area with several other picnic and fishing areas around the edge of it.
This was a boat launch that we had to walk near to get from one hole to the next. If you look really closely, you can see a guy out on the dock trying his luck at fishing.
With such a beautiful backdrop, we decided that a selfie was in order. We had only played about four holes at this point, but we were still verging on "hot mess" territory. It wasn't super hot out yet, but the sun was starting its ascent in the sky and as I mentioned before, it was humid, so we were quite sweaty!
After crossing that parking lot/boat launch, the holes became more wooded and we found ourselves dealing with a lot of trees getting in the way. @mrsbozz actually did really well for her first time in a while playing. She can throw a disc well, but the discs they use for disc golf are a different animal. They each have unique properties that make them do different things.
I actually know a lot of people who only play with a putter when they are starting out because a putter has many similar properties to a standard disc. It's just easier for them to make the transition.
It was about 9:00 by the time we got to the course that morning and we were the only ones out playing. There were several cars in the parking lot, but I think most of those people were hanging out at the boat launch or were already out on the lake.
It gave me the opportunity to take my time and capture shots like the one above. It's nothing special really, but I liked the way you could see the sun reflecting off the lake through the trees.
This was another inlet around hole six or seven that you had to try and avoid. The water was pretty murky and nasty in this area, so if you disc went in there, good luck trying to fish it out!
As you can see, they did cut down some trees lately, or they fell and they were just cleaning them up. I found a website that indicated this course may have recently been reconfigured. I can't verify that, but it would appear in the last ten years or so that they expanded it and changed the configuration of many of the holes.
This fairway might not look too bad compared to the next one I am going to show you, but believe me, those trees can be nasty and they find a way of jumping in front of your disc at the worst of times. It's rough!
As I said, some of the holes had pretty narrow lanes for you to throw through. This is an example of one that I think needs cleaning up. There is a difference between having a tight throwing lane and the greenery just being out of control.
They could easily clean up some of those branches and still give you a tight lane to navigate on your tee off shot. For some reason I think on this hole @mrsbozz lost control of her disc and it went hard right on her. I had to climb through pickers and nettles to get it out. She kept telling me just to leave it, but there is something about discs that makes you never want to "leave a man behind".
I got a fair number of scratches on my arms and legs, but I eventually found it!
I just realized, based on the way the course was laid out, we played the front 10 holes as opposed to the front 9 holes.
@mrsbozz finished with a 38 over par which honestly isn't that horrible for what was essentially her first time playing. She has a good throw and motion, so if she can get more power behind her toss, I think she could shave quite a few strokes off her game.
I finished with a 15 over which honestly isn't that great, but it seems to be about what I have been averaging this year. I have been messing with my approach and release trying to get more distance and I think that has been throwing my game off this year. I'm going to try and get back to basics and just work on making clean shots versus going for distance.
I have to believe @mrsbozz had a good time because she suggested we play again the next day on Saturday morning. That's a story for another post though!
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