Day 3: Tourney Round 1 at the Palms

Day 3 of my trip and the first tournament day started with a hardy breakfast at The Fez restaurant inside the Casablanca hotel at 5:30am.  I'm still on eastern time so no trouble getting up this early.  $3.99 gets you 2XL eggs prepared how you'd like them, hash browns, 3 strips of bacon and toast.

I drive over to the Palms Golf Course and get in some putting and hit some balls at the range in prep for our 8am tee time.  The first thing I notice on the official scorecard is the length we would be playing from, which was 6,847 yards.  Three of the par 3's were over 200 yards and two of the par 4's were over 445 yards. That's a lot of golf course for me.  I usually play from just over 6,500 back home.

Palms Golf course is a tale of two courses really.  The front nine is mostly flat and the back nine has extreme elevation change.  My foursome is assigned the 10th tee to start.  Here are a couple of pictures from the back nine.

I played very well on the back nine, shooting a 41.  The back is actually the longer of the two nines but some of that distance is due to the elevation changes.  There are several drives that are from high cliffs and hills way above the fairway.  

Here are a few pics from the Front nine:

The front nine reminded me of golfing in Florida!  Flat and long!  I shot a 47 on the back for a total of 88.  My round of 88 was good enough for 15th place going in to round 2.  The leaders were at 81 in the 30 Man flight. 

Next post: Day 4: Round 5.