It was still fairly early on Saturday morning in Cadillac when @mrsbozz agreed to head out to one of the local disc golf courses with me. She has been really supportive of my hobby and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. For a while, she was playing with me, but then she hurt her ankle, so these days she just carries my bag and listens to her audiobook as I play a round.
Hopefully one day she can start playing a round with me again. I need to get her some better discs to throw sometime.
The sun was just starting to come up over Lake Cadillac and it gave me some really great shots like the one above.
Kenwood Heritage Park is just a short trip up the road from Mitchell State Park in Cadillac, MI. In fact, I thought about throwing our bikes in so we could just ride up to the course, but instead we just drove around the lake to the park.
The course at Kenwood is pretty short with most holes being 300 feet or shorter. It is quite heavily tree'd though, so that adds an extra layer of difficulty to the course. This is actually one of my favorite courses to play in the state. If we are camping in Cadillac there is a good chance I will be playing this course.
I've noticed there is another course in Cadillac too that I would like to try someday when we have more time.
Although I have bee playing disc golf for over 20 years, I still struggle to get a lot of distance on my throws. Where many people throw over 300 feet, I am lucky if I can get a disc to go 200 feet. To be fair, I have never put a lot of time and effort into extending my game. I was just hoping it might happen naturally the more I play, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
As is usually the case, my round started off really well, and then it kind of fell apart on the back nine. Given the shortness of the holes, each of them was automatically a par 3. I got a two bogeys on the front 9 and five bogies on the back nine that gave me a total score of seven over par. I am actually pretty happy with that. I had some bad throws and the fact that I was able to avoid getting a double bogey on any of the holes is awesome.
Somewhere around hole four or five we came across this tree an I thought it was really cool looking so I decided to take a few shots of it. It's interesting how the one piece of tree sort of wraps around the other one. I don't know if it happened naturally or if someone coaxed it into that position, but it is still pretty interesting.
Near hole five or six we came across a young lady who was playing a round by herself. She had a lot of the fancy gear that the professionals use and she seemed to be putting a lot of time and effort into her round. I slowed my pace a bit to give her some space, but we kept catching up to her. By hole 10 she allowed us to play through and we didn't see her again after that.
I like having fun when I play disc golf, but I am usually all business too. My goal is usually to get through a round in about and hour or an hour and a half. Usually it ends up being closer to two hours (especially when I am playing with other people).
The UDisc app that I use has a feature where you can set your starting location, then throw a disc and set your end location and it will tell you how far you threw the disc. I gave it a shot with my main driver and threw what I considered to be a really good drive.
Turns out I was only looking at about 172 feet. I'm in a Facebook Disc Golf group where people have only been playing for 2 years and they are throwing over 300 feet. Old and young alike, so I am not quite sure what my issue is.
If you haven't been able to tell, it's really bugging me though.
One of the things I love about this park is the fact that it encompasses older areas of the park that you can tell used to be used for other things. There are picnic tables like this laying around, as well as old structures like the one you see in the background.
Towards the end of the course, you make your way out of the woods and back towards the road which runs along the edge of the lake. As you can see, by the time we made it here the sun was well above the horizon.
As we were leaving, I came across this downed tree that had these little bits of fungus growing on it. It was a really great effect, so I decided I had to get some shots of it. As you can see in some areas the growth was almost fully covering the wood.
If you ever make it up to this area, Kenwood Heritage Park is a must visit. The park actually extends to a smaller strip of land across the street on the lake. They have a playground area, a small beach, a boat launch, and another smaller putt and approach style disc golf course that I have never played. You can see the baskets in the open areas though.
Even if you aren't into disc golf, this is still a really great park to hang out at. Just up the street is a small place called Cheryl's Landing where you can get lunch items or ice cream.
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