Ground golf

 My wife and I have joined a neighborhood ground golf club. We play every Monday and Thursday morning, if it is not raining. The course is eight holes, two 50 meters, two 35 meters, two 20 meters and two 15 meters. We play three rounds or 24 holes. Par is 24 for a round or 72 for the three rounds. There is no competition and you just play for your own score. Everybody calls it practice so we all root for each other.

 

 The ball is made of some sort of hard plastic and the club I use belongs to the club and was paid for by the town. The club is a bit away from me in this picture so it looks shorter than it is, about a meter. The clubs and balls are designed so that they do not rise in the air when you hit them but more or less run along the ground.

 This is a hole. Actually there is no 'hole' but a round wire frame. The flag pole reaches the ground so that it will block the ball if you can hit it. There are three vertical wire supports that block ball and cause all sorts of trouble.

 This is the tee for hole number one. The ball is placed on the round raised thing at the right end. The blue string is a marker that shows where the tee should be placed. Lots of people use this field for various activities so everyone pounds markers down into the ground so they lay out their sport accurately. We use blue strings for tees and red strings for holes.

This is the administrative equipment. On the left in front of the box is a bag containing sticks with numbers on them. You draw a number and your name  (written on a piece of wood) is placed on the appropriate slot on the white paper. The box top on the right contains the yet unused names and the numbered sticks that have already been drawn. Once everyone has done this, the groups are consolidated into teams of three or four, even five sometimes. The group at the top of the paper starts at hole one, the group in the middle at three, and those at the bottom at five.

This is a team of three playing. The man on the left is lining up a shot toward the hole which is off to the left. This field is a double soccer field and we have half of it reserved for our games. The tree covered hill in the immediate background is the tomb of a noble from a thousand or so years ago.

Ground golf is just the right amount of exercise and we enjoy the group, usually one or two more men than women. One of the men is also in my art class and two others are in my GO club, so it is really a group of friends. While we play another group from a different neighborhood plays on the other half of the ground.