A Fall Weekend Golf Trip To Grand Rapids

I’m a Spring/ Summer guy and strongly prefer warm weather to cold.  So Fall, as the harbinger of Winter, is for the most part not something I look forward to.  But Fall does have at least one redeeming quality – my annual October golf trip to Grand Rapids Michigan.

My son John lives in Grand Rapids during the school year, and typically ever year I make the 5 hour drive up from Dayton to spend a long weekend with him in early to mid October.   I do my best to try to make the trip on a weekend with weather which is conducive to golf.  But the weather doesn’t always cooperate – last year for example we weren’t able to golf due to rain.  But the forecast was quite favorable the weekend of the 15th.  To make this as easy and care free of a trip as possible, I decided to leave my Canon DSLR equipment at home (GASP!) and shoot with my little Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 point and shoot camera.  So the pictures you see below were taken with both it, and with my iPhone 4 camera.  Just click on any of the photos for a larger view.

I usually try and visit with his school teachers on Friday afternoon.  He started high school this year and is in a beautiful new facility where 1400 plus students attend.  I feel truly blessed that he has such a positive learning environment:

After my son gave me a tour of his new school (he’s off to a good start this year – all A’s so far) we headed to my hotel to unpack, then grabbed a bite to eat.  Our next stop was to do a little shooting at  Silver Bullet Firearms Indoor Range & Training Center.

Silver Bullet has a very clean, modern range with friendly, knowledgeable staff, and an impressive selection of firearms and accessories offered in their retail operation.  Perhaps my only criticism in their range is the 7 yard (21ft.) minimum shooting distance required at their range.  I typically shoot at a range of 15 – 25 ft. back home.  This minor issue notwithstanding, John and I had an excellent time at Silver Bullet.  I had both my wife and son take a “First Shots” class earlier this Summer so he could learn proper gun safety and marksmanship techniques.  He seems to really enjoy shooting:

After our time at the range, we saw the movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK which we both really liked.  It got John asking about getting his bachelor’s degree in business.  Hmmmm…..  We also ended up seeing the new Bruce Willis movie RED on Saturday night, which was also enjoyable.  We saw both movies at the Grand Rapids Celebration Cinema South – great place to catch a flick:

The next day was our first golf adventure of the weekend at Indian Trails golf course in Grand Rapids.  Indian Trails is an 18 hole city course that’s been a lot of fun for us to play for years.  It’s very reasonably priced, low-difficulty, and quite scenic – particularly in the Fall.

I shot a 98 on Saturday, which wasn’t bad at all considering it’s been about 7 weeks since I’ve played.

After our round, we decided to watch the Michigan-Iowa game (which U of M lost unfortunately…) at one of our favorite pizza spots in town – Uccello’s:

I grew up in South West Michigan, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s no other pizza better than Chicago style, which you just can’t seem to get in Dayton:

Sunday afternoon we played our second and final round of the weekend at Saskatoon Golf Course.  Saskatoon is also a public course, but much nicer than Indian Trails – one of the nicest courses I’ve played in the West Michigan area.  Conditions were just perfect for golf and for picture taking:

I didn’t do quite as well at Saskatoon as I did at Indian Trails – 105 after 18 as Saskatoon.  I guess I was distracted by the beauty around me.  🙂

After our round, I took my son back to his home, and made the drive back to Dayton.  This year’s Fall golf trip was GREAT!  The golf was excellent… good movies….lots of laughs.  And many, many memories.

-John