Tics, Trips, and Innova Discs

First, I'd like to say that I hate this new Blogger interface. Just felt like voicing that with you guys.

Okay, onto the blog topic. My birthday was April 19, and I chose to host a blog hop for such a day. Then there was an issue with uploading my video, or how many takes I had to do because small children or dogs kept running into the shot. Then, my phone decided to delete the video. Then my phone and computer decided to completely stop working. Ugh. But it went up, and I've gotten some feedback, so that's kind of rad.

I love this company

Once all of that was taken care of, I drove to a disc golf course I've never been to. And proceeded to get lost...a couple of times. At last, I found the place and met my Partner in Crime for a round of disc golf, brought to you by Innova Discs. Why? A couple reasons:
1) Disc golf rocks
2) Research for editing My Sister's Memories. Disc golf has a pretty big portion of the book, and so I decided to do some real life research (and you thought research can't be fun!!)

Hand written "Pay Here" sign

So we did the check in, which was a weird place with a drop slot for money, and threatened, Those caught not paying will be banned from the course for LIFE. Unfortunately, the internet didn't say whether or not they had a credit card machine or not, and I had no cash.Thus, as per usual, I had to borrow some money.

The first "course" we found was like a putt-putt course, and we were really, really confused. Mike hadn't played before, but I had, and the places I've played at, had distance...not putting. So we did 9 holes of putt putt, and thought that was it. Until we went adventuring and found some arrows which led us to actual Hole 1. Which was over a mountain, basically. We went back to the intro part, and got a new score card and replace Lola (him) for Iron Man, and Frank (me) for Captain America. We are just that awesome. :)

Yay! He found his disc!

For those of you who haven't played before, here's the thing. You lose your discs, pretty readily. You find discs (most of the time). 90% of the time spent (at least for newbies) is searching for the disc you threw thirty seconds ago. We once found mine in a tree. Mike had to throw rocks at it to get it down. Mike also lost his discs a few times.

My skills were pretty sub-par (no pun intended). While Mike was hitting par most of the time, or at least close to par...I was getting like 7's, and 8's. I felt exactly how Allie did when she first played (except her Mike was a really good player, and eventually she got better).

There were 18 holes. There were a lot of trees and rocks, everywhere. When we walked, I kept tripping over myself and Mike twisted his ankle once. (Not to fear, he was fine.)

Definitely hit all of
those trees

We were constantly trying to get our discs around the trees, but 99% of mine landed right INTO the tree. Plus, I had a crazy left hook most of the time that landed me out in the middle of nowhere while Mike was still on the green. There were times where both of us had to attempt to find a missing disc, and we were in trees, and weeds, and thorn bushes. The entire time I was pushing through all of that crap, I was praying I wouldn't end up finding any tics on me, because tics freak me out more than anything else in this world.

Outside of that, it was really, really warm out. I was thirsty, and tired, and wanted beer because it was my birthday. Still, we pressed on.

There was one shot, where we saw Mike's disc go way into the air, and swoop down like an eagle catching a fish. When we found it, it looked like this:

Sticking straight out of the ground

Overall, the experience was a lot of fun. I ended up losing by oh...a million points,  but it was awesome, and I will definitely play again. I also felt like I was getting a decent amount of stuff to write about, the only hard part is that any time we get information about Allie, she's talking through a diary. So...now I have to figure out a way to make it feel less like an info dump.

This is what we looked like
when we finished

So, wondering what we learned from this experience? Well, we learned a few things:
1) Learn to throw better
2) Bring either water or beer
3) Wear adequate clothing (our legs were all sorts of torn up afterward)
4) It's nice to play for fun rather than for winning
5) Avoid trees

Then for my birthday we went to a Tavern rather than a Pub. They had free pasta, which was awesome, and we ordered a couple of drinks and nachos. As I was sitting there, I felt something crawling on my leg. And then I figured out it was a tic. I went to the bathroom, flushed that little butthead down the toilet. Then when I checked my leg again, I found another on my pants, and nearly screamed. I felt like I was infested.  When I went home for the night, I found another in my hair.

And then I remembered: I hate tics. Here's hoping I don't get Lyme.