Meadow Brook Golf Course Review

If you expect golf courses to be green, lush expanses of grass, first off, that's wrong and you should feel bad.  Secondly, you may want to look elsewhere.  Meadow Brook, which is in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is not the golf course for you.  The fairways are clearly not irrigated, so they're nice and brown.  Well, I say fairways, but what they are sort of recommended playing fields.  There's not much of a difference between fairway and rough, and when there is, the fairways are 20 yards wide at most.  Surprisingly, the greens are in very good condition.  I was at the Penn State golf course this summer, and the greens at the Blue Course, the supposed championship course, were in worse shape, and that was a month earlier in the summer.  Having lots of experience with greens in terrible shape, it is nice not to have any big gaping bare spots in the green.

The last hole, a short par 4

This isn't the most conventional golf course in the world.  It's a par 72, but it's under 6,300 yards.  The front is over 3,300 yards, which is fairly typical, but the back nine is under 3,000, which is not so typical.  Playing the course, I can understand why.  The property is not very big, and they really had to squeeze 18 holes onto it.  It shows, the 13th hole is a par 5 that doglegs 90 degrees after about 250 yards, and the fairway is crammed up against the property line along the first section of fairway, and the rest of the hole plays down a big hill right along a pond.  There's a 120 yard par 3 with an island green.  Somehow in this tiny place, there's a 615 yard par 5, though the tee wasn't all the way back when I played it.  Not that it needed to be harder, I made a double bogey playing from 540 yards.  There's a par 4 that said 340 yards on the scorecard, but it played right into the wind and felt closer to 440 yards.  The ninth hole drops about 100 feet on the tee shot, and the drive has to split two groups of trees somehow perfectly placed right where a good drive will land.  To make it even weirder, these trees are only about 30 yards apart.  The green climbs up almost as much as the fairway dropped down.  Okay, that's an lie, but it did slope pretty hard from back to front.  Not a green where you want to be above the hole.

The par 3 15th

What did I think of the place?  It was weird in places, and that 13th hole really did not work, but I liked it.  It was out there, and it wasn't afraid of it.  It's certainly an exercise in routing skill, it took nothing short of genius to get a full golf course in that area.  It wasn't that hard either, sure, I enjoy the occasional challenge, but having to work for bogey all the time gets tiresome.  It's nice to go to a place where you don't have to work too hard, but isn't so easy as to be boring.  As I said, it was never boring.  It was a very nice day while I played, late afternoon into evening, not too hot, nice and sunny, perfect golf weather.  Really, can't ask for more than that.