Immediately after our trip to Hocking Hills in Ohio, we turned around and headed out in our camper for a weekend camping trip. I mean like got home on Thursday from Ohio and left on Friday for a short weekend in the Gladwin City Park.
One of the really cool things about this campground is the fact that it is connected to a pretty decent network of trails that take you to different areas of the city. Gladwin is quite small, so it isn't anything expansive or vast, but it is still nice.
In fact, my buddy and I rode our bikes from the campground to the disc golf course. We played all nine holes this course has to offer and then we headed back to our campsite. It was a pretty great day.
The course is really clean and well kept. I appreciate that, I think it helps when the local municipality has a stake in the course. They seem to do a better job of keeping them in good condition.
As you can see from the screenshot here, I did pretty okay. I have been playing for several years now, but I am far from a professional. I wouldn't even call myself and expert honestly. My friend held fairly well for this only being his third time playing disc golf. The holes at this park are fairly short, so it is more of a technical course than a grip and rip one. That is helpful for newer players who might not have the power to drive those long holes.
As you can see, it was really just two holes that did me in. I had my fair share of pars and a couple of bogeys that could have easily become pars.
This is my go-to disc. The Innova Stingray. I am not even sure if they make these anymore, but I own(ed) three of them and it is the disc that I can throw most consistently. It actually has a fairly slow speed to use it as a driver, but like I said, I make it work pretty decently.
Unfortunately, since my friend doesn't have his own discs I let him borrow one of my Stingray's and a putter. Somewhere around the seventh hole we lost track of his tee shot and a Stingray just like the one you see above was lost to the brush.
It's not a huge deal, that kind of stuff happens, plus, I have my name and contact info written on the back of the disc so if some upstanding disc golf player finds it, they will likely contact me. I also made a post to my local disc golf Facebook group so members can be on the lookout for it.
We took about an hour to play the full nine holes. It likely would have been less, but we spent a fair amount of time looking for that lost disc. The overgrowth was pretty intense and it was infested with these stinging nettle plants that made it even more difficult to search, especially in shorts!
The picture above was taken at our camp site, but I feel it gives a fair representation of how thick the growth could be in areas. Chances are it will be Fall or Winter before I hear anything from anyone about that lost disc. Unless they happen upon it by some stroke of luck searching for their own lost disc.
We spent the rest of our day hanging on the banks of the Cedar Rive in Gladwin, started a campfire and had some libations, just as it should be!
