Golf

Background

June 2023 - June 2024 I golfed 18 holes in every US state, as well as DC, and Ontario. The golfing journey started initially when I was faced with the decision of renewing my lease in Denver. I love Denver, I love my friends, and the combination of majestic landscape with almost year round great weather makes it one of the best places to live in the entire country. The only thing missing is family, and I wanted to spend some time with my family in Florida, and Ohio, so I decided I was going to spend the summer in both places for a few weeks to get some quality time with the fam. Once everything was in a storage unit, and the car was packed with everything I thought I would need for 2 months, I started driving to Florida. At this point in my life, my passion for volleybally and snowboarding were dwindling in the face of constant injury, and my passion had shifted to golf as the sport is much less taxing on the body. I also was not even close to a level of mastery that I wanted to be at, so there was a lot of oppurtunity to progress my skillset on the course. As I began the drive to Florida, I stopped at hotels, and airbnbs along the way spreading a 24 hour drive into 3 weeks. Along the way, I started golfing, as it was a good way to spend the afternoon, and I got a chance to play after practicing all week at the range. After playing in Kansas, and Illinios, an idea started forming. By the time I had gotten to Georgia, that idea had morphed into a legitimate goal. That goal, was to golf in all 50 states.

Upcoming Posts

This portion of my website is dedicated to golf, and over the next year (currently May 2025) I will be retracing my journey across the US by posting pictures, videos, and general posts that occurred 2 years ago. You might be wondering, why post this now? The answer is, I took a lot of pictures, and videos, however, I am not really that enthusiastic about posting to social media, so most of the content that I have is all on my phone, or in the cloud. I considered posting all of this as I was doing it, but as it turns out, working 10+ hours a day M-F, and driving 8+ hours on the weekend, while squeezing in 5-10 hours of golf, doesn’t leave much time for anything else but sleeping, and eating. I did some site seeing when I was motivated, and hung out with friends if they happened to be in the city I was in at that time. I suppose I could’ve been a little more transparent about where I was going to be on Facebook, or Instagram to potentially link up with other friends across the country, but like I said, social media posts were not high on my list of priorities. The most important thing was making sure I had sufficient internet, and I was either on top of, or working ahead of what priorities were at work, which required putting in a lot more time and effort that I would typically during normal week.

Balancing the Nomad Life

Embracing a life on the road, is not a new concept, but it is definitely something that has become more prevelant since Covid, bouncing around the country, can be fun, and it can also be challenging and quite chaotic at times, the one thing I wanted to be certain about was that I was not jeopordizing the ability to work on the road, and the key to that was making sure that I never allowed work to slip. Only driving during the weekends, or holidays, and being sure that I had the essentials when I got to my next destination so I was ready to take on the challenges of that week. As part of the journey, I learned some really interesting methods to living as a nomad. There will be some posts over the next year where I cover some of the nomad aspects of being on the road constantly. There are some learnings that would help anyone that was considering doing something similiar, or maybe just wants to consider what it might take to thrive as a rolling stone.

Tracking Data and Website

Tracking my progress was something initially I was not planning on doing, until I got to Florida, so my Google timeline and location tracking was sparse for the first month. However, after I made determined I was golfing all 50 states, I decided I would want to track my path, and progress. Which after I turned this on, I soon realized, I had a project on my hands that would connect my round tracking (through The Grint, a golf tracking app) and location tracking through Google Timeline. Fortunately for me, my profession is a Dev Ops Engineer, which I happen to be very very Developer oriented on the Dev Ops spectrum. After a few months, I began exporting my Timeline data, and Golf data to merge them into a map that followed my every move. That is something you can see on the my golf/maps page, or click 50 State Journey below

How I built this will also be the focus of a couple posts as part of the next year, so be sure to look out for those in the coming months.

Where I am, and What’s to come

What am I doing now? Well, after the 50 state journey was finished I found myself wondering that exact thing, “what to do now?”. I have heard people say, “Well now that you got 50 states, you gotta start doing countries” and I love that idea, but I don’t know that it would work the same. Having a car was sort of pretty important, and travelling to other countries would likely shift my timezones to put me in a less than optimal window for working. While I like to think about it, I don’t see it being a direction I go anytime soon. The decision about what to do next was actually made a lot easier by my family in Mentor Ohio. As I was treking across the country, I often would talk about how nice it would be to have the ability to golf year round, without having to do any of the driving. Which usually lead to me dreaming about building a golf simulator on long drives from state to state. I even kicked around some ideas with a friend in Denver about creating a mobile golf simulator in Denver that would bring the golf to you. While these were mostly passive thoughts, my family in Ohio had started the process of getting an old greenhouse in my Grandma’s backyard prepped for becoming a golf bay. December 2024, my brother went to war with the disgusting mess that was a long ago forgotten building. It was only really used for collecting old junk, and storing the riding lawn mower. There was a solid 50-60 years of grime, and stuff accumulating in the greenhouse, and he cleaned it out. After that my cousin who can build dam near anything, dove in and built out the platform and impact screen for hitting balls indoor. Unfortunately there was a nasty leak, and it looked like the plans for a bay were going to end up like the previous content of greenhouse, forgotten, and left to rot. My Grandma and my father decided that it would be a good investment to replace the roof to ensure if there greenhouse was going to get any use, that it would stay dry. So the plans were back on, and at that point it was almost Christmas, so I figured I could spend the holiday out there to hang out with the family, and see if a golf bay would scratch the itch. After two weeks, I had the bay up and running, it was pretty primitive, but the beginnings of Chambers’ Bay had started, and I could see how awesome this project could be. I will spend some time diving into the details of this project for any simulator, or home automation enthusiasts as I had a lot of learnings building a golf sim from scratch. Fortunately my cousin, and my neighbor were able to help and give guidance on the technical aspects of building some of the important parts of the bay. Weather it was a couple of tools, an entire door, or just an example of structural setup to ensure everything was sound, I was able to get it to point where I didn’t really want to leave.

50 States

• May 30th 2023 - Everything is packed into a storage unit, I play one last round in Colorado at Broken Tee with one of my friends not knowing that this was going to state #1 Colorado

Golf Rounds

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