Quarry Ridge Golf Course in Portland, CT

Course description: hilly. Best advice? Stay in the fairway. Duh.

Denny and I drove a little further afield this week to take advantage of an Internet special price at the Quarry Ridge Golf Course in Portland, CT. If you "liked" the golf course on their Facebook page, you could play eighteen holes with a riding cart for $26. So I grabbed the coupon online and Denny paid the senior price of $42. That's a little bit more than we normally spend (2 golfers, one pension, remember?) but this was also the first time we've played golf in Connecticut so we were going to be able to check CT off our list of states.There are actually three golf courses in very close proximity to each other: Quarry Ridge, Portland Country Club and Portland West Country Club. The gentlemen in the threesome in front of us said that the Portland Country Club was a bit shorter but was always in good condition. When Denny and I had driven past the course on the way to Quarry Ridge the parking lot was packed.
There are four sets of tees at Quarry Ridge, the longest being the black tees with a yardage of 6389 and a slope/rating of 124/70.9. The blue tees which most of the men used have a yardage of 6049 yards and a slope/rating of 119/69.5. The red women's tees have a yardage of 4852 and a slope/rating of 117/68.7. As you can see from the pictures, on the first few holes the course slopes steeply off to the right and on others you might find some granite outcroppings to bounce your ball off.Just to make things entertaining, we discovered a couple of foxes resting and later playing on the seventeenth fairway. It appeared that one of the foxes just might have been playing with a golf ball.Water really doesn't come into play on this course. There are some thick woods and a few areas of thick weeds where Denny lost a ball or two but for the most part the challenges of this course comes from the uphill/downhill lies and not being familiar enough with the course to know how/where to play the dog legs. Play was a bit slow as there were a lot of golfers out on a Wednesday but the golfers were friendly and pleasant and Denny and I had a nice day despite the length of time we were out there.

There were some boggy areas on some of the fairways that were in a valley due to recent rains and some of the tee boxes were a little rough but for the most part the golf course was in decent condition for the amount of play that it gets. We had fun, and that's the whole point of being out there.