Yakima Valley trip Easter 2007: Day 4

Finally, the final day. To recap, you can check out Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Day 4 began with a golf game.

Yakima has a couple golf courses. Instead of going to a fancy one like the Apple Tree Golf Club, we opted for a par 3 course which only cost $9 for a round of 9 holes. Shawn and Megan don't really play golf, so overall it was really good to get out on a shorter course that didn't have any water.

Here's Megan and Shawn with their rental sets:

The game didn't really get off to a good start. As we looked to start the round I couldn't help but notice the busy 4 lane road alongside the first hole. This, I assumed would be a bad thing since I hadn't swung a club in months. Even when I'm playing well I somehow manage to play most of the course from the wrong fairway anyhow.

On the other hand, the hole was a short par 3 easily reachable with a 9-iron. It's hard to really mess up a 9-iron (I had convinced myself), so I just decided to tee off, and hope for the best.

It was fairly apparent the best had not happened, when shortly after contact, the ball started floating left into heavy traffic. As the ball slowly drifted off the fairway, over the fence, and into oncoming traffic, I couldn't quite shake my visions of the worst case scenario. Luckily the ball bounced between multiple oncoming cars without hitting any of them. Un-luckily the ball bounced high and into a neighboring high school parking lot. It hit someone's car, and, as Albert King would say "if it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have no luck at all"...  Turns out the owner of the car was out on his smoke break - lucky me.

He picked up the golf ball, sat there for a couple of minutes until there was a break in the traffic, and then ran across the street. At that time I was trying to remember if I was liable for my bad shot, if the course was liable for their bad location, or if he was liable for bad parking (9-iron distance from a crappy 9 hole golf course is not a great place to park.)

Shawn was nice enough to take a photo of me walking over to chat with him:

I suppose I had the advantage of having a long metal golf club with me, but this guy was very level headed for a senior high school student. I was expecting a show of emotion, and immaturity. As it turns out his dad owned an auto-body shop in town, so he wasn't worried about getting the dent fixed at all. I suppose I was a bit lucky there - hit the car of the guy who's dad owns the town auto-body shop... He gave me back my ball, I apologized for my horrible golf game, and we went our separate ways.

Instead of teeing off again I treated the highway as a lateral hazard, and dropped the ball where my ball went over the fence. I feel pretty confident that was the best way to go.

Related to this, I didn't play the 9th hole which was 6-iron distance, and even closer to the highway. I just assumed I'd hit someone, so I took out my pitching wedge, and aimed for the far right side of the fairway. Turns out it was Megan's turn to hit her ball into oncoming traffic, and hers actually bounced in the middle of the road and landed on someone's roof with a very loud crash - nobody came out, but Megan showed no interest in retrieving her ball from the yard where it stood out like a sore thumb.

At the end of the round I was just happy nobody was hurt...

Anyhow, we had lunch at a french bistro, and then decided to pack it in for the weekend.

Here's the wine I brought back to Seattle:

On the way back we ran into a snowstorm - which we weren't at all expecting - about 40 miles from Snoqualmie Pass. Yakima was sunny, hot, and beautiful, but just as we got on I-90 we started seeing the storm clouds in the distance. We had blizzard like conditions for about 25 miles, and I was a bit worried we'd run into a bad situation in Snoqualmie Pass, but by the time we got there it had cleared up. I called Shawn, who was going back to Seattle through the South highway to warn him about the weather, but I couldn't get through to him. Turns out he ran into a massive snow storm, and had to turn back. He later saw a snow plow coming by, and turned around to follow it through the pass, and made it back in 5 hours (almost twice as long as Cheryl and I took on I-90).

Here's a shot of the weather before the blizzard:

Anyhow, we did make it back, made a great pasta dinner, and opened some of our newly acquired wine.

That's it for now, hope you get a chance to head out to Yakima sometime if you haven't already.