Still, 73 degrees in the middle of January shouldn't be celebrated by sitting inside watching football. That calls for shorts and flip-flops and being outside somewhere, doing something.
And on Sunday, "something" meant that I would find one of the Frisbee golf courses that are located in my county's park system. Well, "disc golf courses" to be precise. Although playing Frisbee golf with something other than an authentic Frisbee seems just plain wrong to me. So I found the closest course on Mapquest, got some general idea of how to get there, and took off. I was about halfway there when I realized I had left my Frisbee on the table by the door. Hmm. Setback. But I wasn't going to turn around and go home to get the Frisbee; not when I had the viable alternative of going to the course and playing a round of zen Frisbee. A round where I was guaranteed not to hook the disc into someone's back yard.
I had an interesting scenic tour of part of the county I hadn't been in before, while searching for the park, thankful that I started out with a full tank of gas. When I got to the park, it was so big that I couldn't find the course right away, so I wandered around. Perfectly reasonable course of action, given that it was 73 degrees. In the middle of January. There's the kiddie playground, with swings and slides. There's the picnic shelter. There's the path through the woods, with carved signs identifying the types of trees; someone's Eagle Scout project. There's the football field; there's the tennis court.
Ah. Way over there is the sign welcoming you to the disc golf course, and informing you of the rules: no alcohol, and you have to be gone by dark. Beside the sign was the path leading into the woods, as they have laid out this course through a small forest, the better to have trees and streams as obstacles. And ten feet down the path is a bench, where someone is clearly waiting for his disc golfing buddy to show up so they can start a round. How could I tell? He was carrying a shoulder bag full of flying discs. There must have been at least 10 of them. I couldn't help thinking to myself, "Holy cow. What a geek." But I kept my thoughts to myself, realizing that I was wandering through the woods that constituted this disc golf course, wearing an aloha shirt, shorts, and Corona flip-flops, and I didn't even have the excuse of carrying even a single Frisbee. Or some other, alien flying disc.
Fine. Well, I could still walk around and look at the layout of the course, so that if I do return with a Frisbee one day, I'll have some idea of where I'm going. The white posts indicating the tee box for the first hole were closeby. It took three or four minutes of searching before I spotted a disc golf "hole" - a pole with a basket underneath it for the disc to fall into. I walked up to it, and sure enough, it was marked hole number 1. Wouldn't you think that the tee box for the next hole would be in close sight? I would have, but I couldn't find it. Fine. Way off yonder, I could barely make out another "hole", so I set off through the underbrush to see what number it was. As far as it was, it was probably number 4, or maybe 8 on the way back. Nope. It was hole number 2. And here was a group playing up to it, from the other side of the hole (and thus not from anywhere near the first hole). I was considering asking them if they had a map of the course I could look at, or if they could generally point out where the holes ran - but then I realized that each of them had a shoulder bag full of flying discs. And hmm, for that matter, so did those guys walking along a "fairway" for what must be another hole.
Wow. I had discovered a flock of geeks, each one intent on selecting the right disc for the shot he wanted to make. Basing that decision on some variation on this table, listing flight characteristics of some 250 different flying discs (only four of which are actually Frisbees).
Each one of them would examine the next shot they were going to take, rummage through his bag for the "correct" disc, line up the throw, and send the disc on its flight. Invariably, it would bounce off a tree about 30 feet from the start or hook into the stream. So much for selecting a disc based on distance and flight characteristics.
I decided I'd done what I set out to do: I found the disc golf course, I had some idea of what the holes were like, and I hadn't been indoctrinated into the odd cult of bag-carrying disc golfers. Time to go find out how the football games turned out.
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