Disc Golf (and Happy 4th)

I wish a Happy Independence Day (July 4, 2011) to everyone. We are blessed to live in a country where we have so many freedoms. I feel blessed today, as I dragged my wife and four children out to play Disc Golf with me. Here is what my initial attempt at Disc Golf was like:

A friend at work recommended Disc Golf (or Frisbee Golf for the unlearned) as a fun, cheap way to enjoy the outdoors with the family. So to start, I checked out the local second-hand sports equipment store, and I was able to pick up 7 disks. Here is where I discovered that there are different discs depending on how far you want your throw to go. Yes, just like in golf they have drivers, putters and mid-range discs. So I began with mostly drivers, because doesn't everyone enjoy it when the disc / ball / puck goes far and fast? So last Friday with my collection of discs in hand, the next step was to find a course to play on.

There are all sorts of FREE Disc Golf courses around the area. The two I focused my attention on were the Braemer Pool, Edina course, and the Alimagnet (on the border of Apple Valley and Burnsville) course. I was afraid the Edina course would be too crowded. And so my focus turned to Alimagnet. Now, I heard that the Alimagnet course was hard to reach. But I knew it must be near to the Alimagnet Dog off-leash park, where we have been many times taking our pooches. So after convincing my family to test this sport out earlier today, we gave the Alimagnet Disc Golf course a try.

Here I thought Disc Golf would be easy – you hurl your disc as far as you can, and drop it into the hole / basket. The "holes" are really poles covered with chains and a basket to catch the discs. But I couldn't whip my disc anywhere near as far as I would like. But the first couple of baskets were nice, short holes that gave us a good introduction to the game. Just toss it as far as you can, then try and get it close to the basket. But it's much tougher than it looks…

So Asia had the best looking, straight and long throws. But it turned out to be Elijah who caught on the quickest. After the first hole, Elijah ended up having the best score of the family in three of the next four holes. He's such a natural athlete. And I did horribly. Sigh.

OK, it was a beautiful day outside, no bugs, and together with the family. What could be better? Well, it would have been much better if we could have parked in the Alimagnet Disc Golf course parking lot, and not at the Dog Park parking lot. I am told it is off of Garden View Lane, but next time we will have to search it out. But we tried to discover the course through walking the back paths of the Dog Park, which led to a much longer stroll than we were looking for. I am saying we did something on the order of a 'Stripes' 20 mile hike in the forest to finally find the course. But after playing 5 holes, hiking back and finally returning to our car, I saw that we had only spent 1 hour and 45 minutes with our hiking and disc golfing. So it probably was a little shorter than 20 miles. But to my credit, it was mountainous. Err, I mean hilly.

So my overall impression was that if we eliminated the hike trying to find the course, and allowed us to just play disc golf, it was fun enough to try again. I hope to get my family out again here one of these days. Maybe with practice, I can improve from horrible.

May God bless you with peace, provision, and more laughter today and this week. /s/Tom Wolff