Change of Venue: "The Hive" Disc Golf Course
Typically, when @mrsbozz and I go camping in the Cadillac area of Michigan, we make our way over to Kenwood park which is just up the road from Mitchell State Park and I play a round of disc golf there. My wife carries around my disc bag and acts as my caddie as she listens to one of her audio books. This time however, we decided to try a different course that is on the campus of one of the local community colleges in town. It took us a bit longer to get there, but I wanted to try something new.
For as small of a town as Cadillac is, there are actually quite a few high quality 18+ hole courses in the area. The Hive is one of those courses.
It as a pretty dreary day when we showed up to the course but the weather looked like it was going to stay in our favor, so I started to work on the first couple of holes. This course actually had a lot more elevation changes than I expected, but they weren't too horrible and though it gave us a bit more of a cardio workout than we had anticipated, we handled it just fine.
There was a point where the skies opened up a bit and we had to take some cover under some tall trees until it let up. Thankfully, it didn't last too long and we were able to continue the round without having to scrap it and run for the truck. We had talked about taking the umbrella with us at the beginning of the round, but we decided against it thinking it was going to be okay.
Like I said, luckily, it didn't last too long and we ended up being okay with just a minor interruption.
As you can see in the photo above, there was a nice bit of rain on the ground after the storm clouds moved through. This was one of the longest walks you had to take in between holes. Beyond that, things were pretty close together and laid out really well.
One of the things I didn't like about this course was the fact that they had the back half of it running along a property line. Doing that creates problems on a number of levels. People who live there get sick of people going on their property to retrieve errant discs, but when a disc costs $20 or so, it's enough that you don't just want to write it off as a loss.
In the photo above, you can see off to the left is the property line and it's a mental trick to keep yourself from throwing over there.
You can see in the photo above, they have signs that say "private property, do not retrieve". I was lucky enough to keep my discs out of those areas, but I was more than happy to give them the finger just in case they had cameras or something watching the area. Again, my biggest issue here is the person who designed the course. I understand you wanted to add the trees and the tree line as an extra bit of difficulty, but it doesn't make for good neighbors when you do stuff like that.
As you can see here, it was a pretty decent round for me. I ended up shooting a ten over with just one triple bogey that really screwed me over. I'm not so mad about those bogies, but that triple bogey really grinds my gears!
My Garmin watch has a feature where you can install the UDisc app which connects to your phone and tracks your activity as you play a round. It's probably one of the coolest features of my Garmin Forerunner 165 (I think is the model). As you can see, I walked a distance of 2.15 miles and I burned about 482 calories and it took us just about an hour to play the round. I don't put a lot of stock in the calories burned number, but the other ones I think are pretty close.
As fun as this course was, I still think I prefer Kenwood park more. If we go back to this area again, that is likely the course I will end up playing.
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Sounds like quite a round! Glad the rain didn’t stop you and you managed to push through. That triple bogey may sting, but overall, it looks like you handled the course really well. 🤩
Thank you! It was a fun day just because I got to spend it with my wife. A lot of times when you have a hole like that it is hard to recover but I seemed to do pretty well.