WARNING: This post will confirm that I am a spoiled golf snob. I realize this and admit this.

So the recent trip had a pretty simple purpose: See my parents for a few days and play my final rounds of golf for the season. The order of importance of those two things can be debated.

I boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to PHX and played four rounds in four days in Phoenix. The weather was great. I hit it pretty good. But it left me with some lingering questions about the intersection of golf course quality and pace of play.

In my perfect world, I would only interesting golf courses, greens would be smooth, conditioning would err slightly toward the firm side of things and I would never really wait to hit a shot. Now I’m not one of these guy who has to sprint around the golf course. I think anything faster than about 3:15 is too fast, but my focus will vanish if I’m waiting too often or for too long.

After a wonderful first round in PHX, I played a course that was spectacular but not very interesting (more on both of those courses later). On my third day in Arizona, I played at Southern Dunes and was left with more questions than answers.

Southern Dunes is a really good golf course. The course, a Schmidt-Curley design with input from Fred Couples, was originally built to be an all men’s private club. Unlike like too many courses in the Phoenix area, it was built to be walked. Long story short on the course goes something like this: Remote location didn’t help in the recruitment of members, then the economy tanked and, suddenly, the model no longer worked.  The good news in this story is that the course was purchased by a nearby casino and it is still very much up and running as a public course.

The golf course is a great walk. There are a number of great holes and there is an interesting use of angles. Because this was built as a private golf course, the green complexes have much more slope and require more precise shots than many public courses in the Phoenix area.

All of that said, my round at Southern Dunes was easily my poorest experience on this trip and it was completely the result of pace of play. Slow play is never great, but the only thing that’s worse is when the management of the course doesn’t seem to care about it.

After booking my time as a single on GolfNow, I knew that this wasn’t going to be a fast round. It was a Saturday and there was a decent number of players on the course.

Keeping play moving is about more than luck and having a staff member drive around once in a while. My feeling is that a course has the responsibility to all players by creating an expectation that slow play is to be avoided. I think the starter needs to create an expectation that groups should be through six holes in a certain period of time and through nine holes in a certain period of time.

I had accepted the fact that play was going to be slow, but when the “ranger” greeted me as I walked from the second green to the third tee and asked if I had brought a book, I knew I was in trouble. Despite the fact that I tried to walk slowly and tried to take a little extra time when it was appropriate (I also needed to make sure the guys behind me didn’t wait as I was messing around), I made the turn in 2 hours, 40 minutes and walked off the 18th green 5 hours and 15 minutes after teeing off.

It was as brutal as you could imagine.

I will spare you the blow-by-blow details — and this post would have been really something had I written it the same day I played — but want to share the biggest examples of how this was a total gong show.

The group in front of me was made up of four older guys, at least three of whom were playing the wrong set of tees. On nearly every par 4 or par 5, at least one of them didn’t get the ball over the initial carry off of the tee. They also had no idea how or where to drive their carts.

Oh the carts. The carts at Southern Dunes have built-in GPS systems. They are the fancy ones that will warn golfers when they drive the carts where they aren’t supposed to go, common sense stuff like staying on the cart path on par 3s and not driving too close too greens. If you do drive in the bad spots, these smart carts generally alert the driver to go back to the cart path. If that doesn’t happen, they simply shut down.

The jokers in front of me had carts shut down three times in the first six holes. When that happened, they would have to put the cart in neutral and then push it back to the cart path. It was a total joke. All the while I was sitting in the fairway with steam coming out of my ears. On No. 6, a par 3 where these guys ended up having to push both of their carts back to the path, there were two groups on the tee and another group on the 5th green by the time the putted out.

When I left Southern Dunes, I didn’t have a tee time booked for the final golf day of my trip. As a result, I was left with the course quality/pace of play dilemma. I was considering playing another one of the bigger name upscale public courses in the area. But after a horrible experience so fresh in my mind, I also wasn’t in the mood to drive a significant distance from my parents’ place and then endure a slow round.

So what did I do? I made a decision that was much more based on pace of play than golf course quality. Not far from my parents is a place called Corte Bella. It’s a private club in a gated community that puts a few tee times a day up on the internet. I played the course once previously and remember it being pretty decent for a housing development course. It’s not great golf and there isn’t a whole lot of serious trouble off of the tee, but the greens have distinct sections that you need to hit to score and there is some OK bunkering and a number of good holes.

My thoughts were that because it is a private club, there were be fewer people out there without a clue as to what they are doing. In addition, I figured there would be fewer people playing the course blind. Most golfers would know where to hit the ball, where not to hit it and, often, what to hit.

It was a great move. While I played behind a twosome with a pair of push carts, they moved along just fine. My waits were short. I made the turn in about 1:50 and walked off No. 18 in exactly 3:45. It was exactly what I wanted an needed.

So my answer to the question is pretty simple. If I can’t have good and fast, I choose decent and pretty fast. That to me is much, much better than good and slow. As someone who doesn’t play 4 1/2 to 5 hour rounds very often, I realize that I’m spoiled. I simply don’t have the patience or the concentration to play rounds that last that long.

So what’s your answer? What ranks higher in your book? Quality of the golf course? Or the ability to not have 18 holes turn into a death march?

I got to the airport recently for a trip to Arizona. I went to the kiosk and printed my boarding passes. I checked my Club Glove Burstproof bag (another thing I like) with my clubs along with a suitcase. Then I headed to the security line.

What didn’t I do? I didn’t reach for my wallet and pull out a credit card.

That, more than anything, is why I like Southwest Airlines.

Sure, I will openly admit that flying Southwest is a bit of a cattle call. If you don’t go online basically exactly 24 hours before your flight (Hint: Set an alarm on your schedule to check in), you have a pretty decent chance of ending up with a middle seat.

Now it can be argued that an airline isn’t exactly a golf thing, but I think it very much is.

My reasoning is pretty simple: Traveling as a golfer means checking at least one bag every time you go on the road. And if I’m going to check one bag, I might as well check two.

Southwest is good with that. They don’t want more of my money to do that. They don’t charge me more money because I’d like to use my own clubs while playing on the road. Instead they encourage playing new places, seeing cool courses and taking along your sticks even if you only have time for one round.

I don’t travel for work nearly as much as I used to, but I still travel about two or three times a year with my clubs. So I support the company that encourages that behavior.

When you add it all up, I probably save enough money on bag fees to pay for a greens fee on the road at a pretty nice place.

Now I’m not going to spend extra money to fly Southwest. And I’m not going to take a trip in which I have to change planes more than once. But if it’s close, I’m all about supporting the golfer-friendly airline.

I think it is finally safe to write this post, considering there is currently a foot of snow on the ground.

I can’t be 100 percent sure, however, because more than once I thought that this golf season was going to be done in Minnesota. But then the weather improved, courses re-opened and there was golf to be played.

As someone who has lived most of his life in Minnesota, I still can’t really believe this 2012 golf season. When I teed it up for the first time in state, the calendar read March 11. There was still snow in some of the bunkers that day at Mississippi Dunes, but we were playing golf.

For me, the Minnesota season would last more than eight months. I played my final Minnesota round of the year on Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving. I certainly know plenty of people who played golf into the early days of December, but I was in Phoenix when the final golf balls of 2012 were struck in Minnesota.

I can’t remember ever playing any earlier in Minnesota — and I wasn’t able to get out for those decent few days in January. My club opened earlier than ever before and was open later than anyone could remember. How can you argue with that?

I played 22 different courses in Minnesota/Western Wisconsin in 2012. Five of them were new to me — Tartan Park, White Bear Yacht Club, New Richmond, Northfield and Emerald Greens. I played a number of really good clubs including: North Oaks, Somerby, Hazeltine, Rochester and Windsong Farm. I played Keller on a wonderful fall day just days before it shut down for renovation.

I’m going to go into some more detail of my 2012 in the coming weeks, but it was a good year.

The season was long. While we did have some hot weather, there weren’t reports of clubs losing greens as there has been in the past. The early spring and late fall had to have been beneficial for daily fee courses across the state. And a friend of mine won one of the biggest amateur events in the state.

How can you go wrong with any of that?

While I have played golf for basically the past 30 years, I didn’t exactly have the most sophisticated golf upbringing.

I grew up in a town of about 20,000 in the rural part of Minnesota. I started playing at a local 9 hole course on the east side of town. Amazingly Valley Golf in Willmar has a website. The golf course stretches all the way to 2,474 yards from the back tees for a par of 35. There are two holes of more than 400 yards. One is a par 4 and the other is a 445-yard “par 5″. The ninth hole is a 210-yard downhill par 4.

It was great when I was in elementary school and the first part of junior high and I could ride my bike to the golf course.

As I got older, became more interested in the game and became a better player, I graduated to the 18-hole course. What was then the Willmar Golf Club is now known as Eagle Creek Golf Club. I basically spent most of my teenage years here. I was there pretty much every day. I played golf, I had a job picking the range and cleaning clubs, I eventually worked my way up to working in the pro shop.

The golf course is typical small-town Minnesota fare. Nine holes were built early in the 1900s and another nine were built probably in the late 60s or early 70s. The golf course has been worked on and improved since my teenage years, but the initial front nine featured a lot of back-and-forth golf and not a ton of interest. At that time, there was exactly one fairway bunker on the golf course.

As a high schooler, I played many of really good courses across the state in tournaments, including some of the big names. But I’m not sure that I really knew what I was playing. I knew that a place like Hazeltine or Wayzata CC or even St. Cloud CC was better, but I didn’t totally get it.

That long windup gets me to this point: I think the first course I played where I went, ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’ was when I played Harrison Hills Golf and Country Club on a regular basis one summer. Harrison Hills is in the tiny town of Attica, Indiana. It was probably about 30-40 minutes from Danville, Illinois, where my first full-time newspaper job was. When I was there in the mid-90s, Harrison Hills had just expanded from nine holes to 18 holes.

The original nine holes were designed by William Langford in 1924.The course was expanded to 18 holes in 1995 by longtime Pete Dye associate Tim Liddy.

Harrison Hills was great for me. It was cheap (even now it is $28 to walk during the week) and it was really interesting. I don’t totally remember my initial feelings about the course, but it was the kind of place that I liked more the more I played it. I started to figure it out. I realized that one some holes — especially some of the Langford holes — it was more important to put your tee shot in the right place than it was to hit a bomb. I realized that hitting even a wedge to a well protected green can make your heart beat a bit faster.

A little more background on Harrison Hills can be found in this post on Golf Club Atlas. And for a little perspective, this small town course — where a single membership costs $800 — ranks as the No. 4 public course in Indiana according to Golfweek.

I always loved golf, but I think that summer made me really get things around architecture. It made me seek out interesting courses and pass on playing bad/boring courses.

I haven’t played Harrison Hills since the summer of 1997. It’s one of those things that I would like to do again, but I haven’t exactly had a reason to get there. A month ago or so, a few Chicago guys from GCA played Harrison Hills and Howard Riefs (who you should follow on Twitter at @hriefs) sent me some pictures of the place that I want to share. It makes me want to go back again. And if for some reason, you find yourself in west central Indiana, make a stop, the course is only a few miles north of Interstate 74.

So what course made you interested in course design? Was there a time when something clicked? Do you not care? That’s fine as well.

At long last, the pictures of Harrison Hills. All of these pictures are of the original Langford holes.

When I started this blog about 18 months ago, I did it largely for my own satisfaction and amusement. I thought it would be a good place to post some photos, log my golf activities and be a little bit creative.

I wasn’t sure who would read it, how much anybody would read it or even if anyone would read it. I post links on Twitter and I know a few people on Golf Club Atlas know about, but I haven’t really worked super hard to drive traffic to this site. To be honest, if I really cared about driving traffic, I wouldn’t have stretches where I don’t post a word.

But earlier this week, I passed the 20,000 page view mark. I don’t really care tons about traffic and whatever growth there has been has been very organic. So I’m pretty humbled that this many people have dropped by to my little corner of the web.

Hopefully you’ve found it to not be awful and maybe you’ve even found it to be a little interesting.

Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it.

Great apologies to my readers on the lack of activity here. But I have an excuse.  I have been playing golf and I present visual proof.

A couple of months ago, I put up a pair of posts featuring Instagram photos. The first had a number of pictures from the summer. The second was basically me putting together an Instagram tour of Hazeltine National.

Here are some pictures from the past couple of months.

Here is a shot of the downhill fifth hole at Island View Golf Club, a very nice semi-private course in Waconia, taken over Labor Day weekend.

Here are a few from Midland Hills Country Club:

Here are two from a round at Rochester Golf and Country Club:

And a couple from the awesome White Bear Yacht Club:

Here is No. 3 at WBYC. The hole is proof that a par 3 doesn’t have to be long to be good.

These are from Eagle Eye, just outside of East Lansing, Mich.

Here is Eagle Eye’s version of TPC Sawgrass’ No. 17.

There is still golf to be played in Minnesota, I’m reasonably certain of that. It will take lots of layers, a stocking cap and at least one more club into every green because swings won’t exactly be free.

But it certainly seems as if the good stuff is behind us.

The reality of living in Minnesota is that the golf season does end. We don’t get 12 months of golf. While I’d certainly rather tee it up than blow snow, I think there is some appreciation that comes with the end of the season.

It may be six months until we get another weekend like the one we just had here this weekend. And if that’s the case, the golf season went out on a high note. I played both days with rounds on good courses and with good company. I hit the ball pretty well, putted it great on Sunday and will thoughts of the weekend will help get me through the winter.

Saturday was a nice round at the new home club. Played the back tees (6,900 yards) and broke 80 on a cool day that got better as time went along.

Sunday was fall golf at its best in Minnesota. It was Oct. 21, but it felt like September. I — perhaps the biggest cold weather wimp on the planet — even considered shorts. I did go with pants, but the fact that I considered shorts in late October tells you something.

I played with a group of 10 that teed it up at Windsong Farm, a very solid Lehman/Fought design. We had a little match play competition. I played pretty well. I was hitting my tee ball close to the same distance as two of the guys in my group, I made three-straight bombs on the front nine (two for birdie, one for a better-than-I-deserved par) that helped my partner and I win the front. When I made the bomb for birdie and the win on No. 9, my partner said I was putting like Poulter. That’s as good as it gets.

If it wasn’t for consecutive doubles on 11 and 12, I would have had a very realistic chance to break 80 on a challenging golf course.

It was a great day. There was good golf, good competition, good conversation and a good burger afterwards.

You can read a little more about the day — and see one of my competitors here giving me grief about my hot putter — here.

If this was the end, it ended on a great day.

Here are a couple of Instagramed pictures of Windsong Farm.

Here is No. 10:

And here is No. 16, a good par 3 over water.

I’m playing today at an upscale public called Eagle Eye, just outside of Lansing, Mich.

On each par 3, they have these signs with distances to the pin. Thought it was a nice touch with how big some of these modern greens are.

The Star Tribune checks in with an update on the U of Minnesota golf course.

I previously blogged about this topic and won’t get any further in to my feelings on the place.

Short story is that the place is going to be saved, but the renovation work will have a budget of $7.5 million instead of closer to $20 million.

My take: It’s good for golf as the course does fill a need. But let’s just say that I won’t be taking a nostalgic last trip around there.

As some of you know, I’m in the process of moving to a different golf club. I’m splitting time for the rest of this season with plans for shifting over fully to the new place in the spring.

One semi-interesting item of the new place is that tee times are spaced 10 minutes apart. They start at the top of the hour and tee times follow on the 10s.

I played Sunday morning at 9:50. With the great weather, the tee sheet was slammed. There were foursomes all over the place. I wasn’t convinced pace of play was going to be all that great.

But something weird happened: The pace couldn’t have been much better.

Because of the 10-minute gap, we didn’t hit our tee shots on No. 1 until the group in front of us took out the pin and started putting. By the time we hit our second shots and were walking to the green, the group in front of us was almost done hitting their tee shots on No. 2.

We waited one time all day. We waited for about 30 seconds on a par 3. The group behind us waited on about three shots all day, something that wasn’t bad considering I was playing with a couple of higher handicap players.

We made the turn in about 1 hour, 50 minutes and finished our 18 holes in 3:45. After teeing off at 9:50, we putted out at 1:35. We never felt rushed and had a very leisurely round of golf. It was great.

Was the 10-minute gap — and the spacing that was established from the beginning — the difference?
I don’t know for sure, but it couldn’t have hurt.

Obviously there are some drawbacks to 10-minute gaps. The biggest of which means that there is one fewer tee time each our and, essentially three fewer tee times over each two-hour stretch. That’s 12 fewer slots for golfers every two hours.

Is that worth it? I would say probably. The knock for many on golf is that it takes too long to play. Because of that, I think courses and club have to do everything they can to make sure that golf doesn’t turn into a 5-hour march.

If 10 minute gaps help assure that, then it is worth it.