6/19

Well, that was fun. And I can’t readily deny that it’s good to be home, where my bedroom is currently sitting at a steady thousand degrees fahrenheit. I think the trip was a success, even though I never really shot that one truly amazing round, had that one truly amazing shot, or interacted with a single woman who wasn’t there with her husband at her side. If I can say that, you have to admit that it wasn’t all bad.
All in all, I ended up playing 50 rounds in 35 days at 28 different courses, spanning over a dozen states. Compare that to the 2 rounds I usually play in that time period, and you can see that the purpose of this tour was certainly achieved: arm fatigue and certain muscle damage. Let’s breakdown what I learned about my disc golf game first.
I interestingly found that I played the first round of each tournament the poorest. My putting was usually off, and although my drives in general were best in the first round, I didn’t ever really put together a super-hot round (with Kansas City’s 993 being the notable exception). It seemed like as each round would wear on, I would putt better and better, too. I think if you took all of my final rounds (not counting Ashtabula, as the winds that final round were steadily 30mph) I don’t know that I missed a single putt within the circle, and I hit plenty outside of it.
My up game started off very surprisingly good during this tour, and soured back to its unacceptable norm by the end. I need to find a disc I can control when I take some power off of it. I did note, however, that if I have plenty of room to throw a hyzer, my up shots are quite good. If I have to throw a straight up shot or even a turnover shot, I’m dead in the water.
Playing with very good players does not make me nervous, although they seem to shoot worse. I shot with 8 of the top 52 players in the world on this tour in tournament play, and not one of them shot an especially killer round when they played with me (Moser, Orum, and Shweb all played poorly when they shot with me).
I need to stop losing discs.

Now, there were other parts to this trip, namely looking at silly places and signs. Although I did not see the abundance of silly named places as with JayMar on our trip to FL (where we hit towns with the names Boring, Bland, Ordinary, Toast, Coats, Fork, and Coward…), there were some nice moments in Paint and Licking County. I did see some interesting signs:

Now these signs are all over PA, actually. I think they’re pretty clever, but in all honesty, I don’t know that they should advertise like this. Here’s why. On my trip, my final mile count was a whopping 6,534.8 miles traversed. That’s an average of 186.7 miles a day. Now, if I were to continue at that pace for a while (which one could convincingly argue would be a amzingly stupid thing to do), by the time I turned 42 I would be able to unclick my belt while driving and not feel guilty by PA standards. And that’s not counting any of the miles I’ve driven BEFORE this tour. Stupid sign. I mean, if they’re going to do that, you might as well see: “Buckle Up: or I will deliberately hit you with my car.” That would work.
I did the entire trip for a cost of $2,240.49. When you consider that over $700 of that was spent BEFORE I EVEN LEFT, I think I did it at a pretty cost-effective rate. And there’s a reason for that –

I also need to thank a whole slew of people, without whom this trip would have been far far stupider and much less rewarding. Thank you to my family who put up with me for the first leg of the trip. Thank you to Mike Trapasso and everyone at the Grange, Steve and Linda Snyder, Jason and Amy Haas, and Dennis and Janna Freeman. Also thanks to Jason Markin and Rebecca , as well as Mike Lateurrer. I certainly can’t forget my sponsors: Jason Marshall, Dave “Cromwell” McHale, Jason Haas (again), and even Kelly Boyce for the dollar I won on the last day. Also a tremendous thank you to my webmaster Jason Lawton for getting this blog up and running. I had no idea anyone would read it, never mind the decent flow of people who sought to read my verbal dribblings. There are countless others, but I really just thought the whole trip was a blast, and thanks to everyone I came across during the trip.

As for the future of this blog: I think I’m gonna keep it going, though not at quite the frenzied pace. I’ll update it when I have a tournament, a road trip, or even just a shenanigan. You never really know when that will happen, after all.