Abita Springs Golf Club

There aren't a lot of choices to play golf near Abita Springs, Louisiana but fortunately the one course near our campground is a fun one.

Mondays and Wednesdays are Seniors and Ladies Day at the golf course so you can play a round of golf for $25 with a riding cart. When Denny and I arrived for our tee time there was a crowd of men ready to tee off who I'm sure were locals taking advantage of the good price and the fact that Wednesday was the warmest day that we had had for a week, although that wasn't saying much. It was overcast, cold and breezy and I was prepared for a miserable day with my tight muscles and sore back.

Indeed both Denny and I started off playing poorly (it was COLD!) but eventually the wind died down and the sun started trying to peek out of the clouds and the two of us settled down to hit a few good shots. This was the first golf course I've ever played where the green were brown; whatever grass they use for their greens apparently goes into hibernation and changes color. Very strange and hard to find the greens when you are playing a strange golf course for the first time. The course itself is a bit short with the yardage on the hole markers and score cards in no way matching where the grounds crews have set the tee markers. So picking a club to hit was a guessing game off the tee although there are the standard yardage markers along the sides of the fairways after you hit your tee shot. Denny played the white tees at 6065 yards with a slope/rating of 124/69.3 while I played the red tees at 4645 yards with a slope/rating of 112/66.8. We were surprised to see that all of the men playing in front of us were playing from the "senior" tees at what we thought was a relatively short golf course.

I have to say Denny and I will need to return to this course to play it again due to the cold weather, the fact that we had torrential rains the night before which made the golf course very boggy (it was cart-path only that day) and the greens were "dead". The course was actually in good condition otherwise and it was obvious the players fixed their ball marks on the greens and their divots in the fairways, which can be rare. The two of us managed to stay out of the sand traps which was good because all the sand traps were mini-ponds due to the rain. There are a lot of ponds and lakes and creeks on this course so you should be prepared to lose a ball or two when you play here.

Once the sun finally came out Denny and I settled down to play some better golf so we'll put this course on our "we'll be back" list.

A Fun Nine Holes

This post is a tad late. Denny and I played the Suwannee Country Club golf course on January 3. We waited until late in the afternoon since we had had four days of miserably cold weather for the Florida panhandle and we weren't sure if the afternoon was going to warm up enough for comfortable play. Fortunately, this is only a nine hole golf course, although the manager was kind enough to offer us a discount ($14 each to play which included the riding cart) for arriving at 3PM plus he told us he'd discount another nine even more should we chose to continue after our first nine holes. Nice people here.

The course is in hibernation and they had just fertilized the greens so it was a bit rough putting. However, while the golf course itself is a bit short at 3087 yards for the men's tees and 2395 yards for the women's tees it plays a lot harder than that. If you play eighteen holes, there is a second set of tees and therefore the men's yardage on the back nine is 3024 for a total of 6111 yards and the women's yardage is 2440 for a total yardage of 4835 yards. I don't have the slope/ratings for this course. There are multiple sand traps placed right in front of your shot to the greens and the greens themselves have slopes and slants that you misread so it is a challenge indeed.

Since we started so late, Denny and I rushed our shots a bit, trying to make sure we finished before dark and therefore we didn't play as well as we could have and we didn't give the golf course the chance it deserved to be played well. While short, the course is fun and certainly it wasn't busy at twilight on a winter's day. We would definitely give this little course another chance on another day.