Majestic Springs Golf Club

Yesterday shortly after lunch Denny suggested we go play golf at the Majestic Springs Golf Course which is just a few miles away from our current campground. I suggested we wait until morning, but after checking the weather forecast for the next few days and seeing that rain and/or thunderstorms were predicted for the remainder of the week we decided to play while we had still had sunshine.

The Majestic Springs Golf Club is located at 1631 Todds Fork Road in Wilmington, Ohio. Probably only a mile or so from the Thousand Trails campground as the crow flies, it's a couple of miles further by country road but it's the closest golf course in the area. Carved out of farmland and built as a links style course, the golf course itself has a surprising number of elevation changes, hills, valleys and slopes to deal with. It's walkable, but on a hot, humid Ohio day I'd definitely take a riding cart. Because Ohio summers are killer humid.
Denny and I paid the surprising amount of $15 per person to play eighteen holes of golf using a riding cart, which is their after 1PM price. Since the golf course just opened after the last few weeks of torrential rains there were quite a few folks out there who had also jumped at the change to play some golf so we ended up joining up with a husband and wife duo who play the course frequently. That was a good thing, because we had only played the course one time previously and that was five years ago. Denny didn't remember playing here at all, but I remembered because the sprinklers had been turned on while we were playing and I got soaked on hole number five. The things you remember, right? But I didn't recall the ins and outs of the golf course and that's why it was nice playing with someone who could point out the hidden dangers on any particular hole. And there are some tricky holes here.

There are four sets of tees to play from; championship, men's, seniors' and women's. The yardage from the championship tees is 6464 with a rating/slope of 70.9/129. From the women's tees the yardage is 4487 with a rating/slope of 65.9/106. Par is 71; there are four par 5 holes, nine par 4 holes and five par 3 holes on the course.Because it has been raining in the Midwest for the last six weeks, the fairways weren't cut as carefully as they normally would be, the rough was higher than normal and there were soggy, boggy areas still. At the fifteenth hole which is a par 5 hole we had to stay on the cart path which ran along a ridge line and slip, slide down the muddy hillside on foot to the fairway to play. Normally this would be a fun hole but it was a bit too squishy for my liking on this day. There are nine ponds on the course and a creek wanders back and forth across the grounds, especially on hole number two where the creek crosses the fairway not once but three times. The creek was really high and the current was quite strong as local creeks and rivers are all still flooded here in Ohio so there was no looking for balls when Denny and Dan hooked their balls into the creek. On this hole depending on where you were, you could hit the creek whether you hit a slice or a hook. Fun hole.

Currently the sand traps aren't in play due to the fact that they are filled with water, but the course has 58 of them scattered around so they could be a problem on nice days. The guys clipped a few trees also here and there so there are plenty of challenges on this course. And the noisiest thing we heard was a peacock screeching at the farm next to the golf course; no road noise, no trains, no planes. Nice.
This is definitely a golf course we'd play again.