So... We stopped off at home in Kalamazoo to drop the Winnie off with my ole' dad and #1 Winnicrew mechanic. Mom and dad were in Texas where my mom was getting her periodic cancer screening. Once you've had it you have to keep getting checked out to see if it comes back. It didn't.

We parked the Winnie in the backyard, collected up the things we needed for the next four weeks and packed them into Dave's Mitsubishi Gallant. It was a tight pack and we drove out to the Twin Cities for the Minnesota Majestic. It's amazing how little gasoline a car uses compared to the Winnie. We shacked up at Matt Koerner's mother's house again this year... sleeping in an upstairs room. It was a good Majestic. Dave tied for the win in Mini-Golf and I was third. It poured rain before and after the final nine, but not during. Barry Schultz held onto his lead and won the tournament. Those of you who went to the 2001 Worlds will be happy to know that hole#5 at North Valley has had a couple trees taken out... there are still plenty left though.

We hung out and traded some of our cash for nice Aviars, then drove down to Rockford, Illinois to Todd Ebens' house where we would park the Gallant and jump into Cameron Rauenhorst's Tioga motorhome and drive out to Northern California. Cameron was coming from the Gateway Open in St. Louis. We all met up... unpacked the Gallant... packed up the Tioga and drove like mad for Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

The Tioga is sweet. It's a 1998 model with a Triton V-10 engine. It has cruise control, air conditioning, a working fridge, working brakes, and best of all... XM satellite radio. This thing was great. No searching for stations. I mostly stuck with the comedy station while I was driving. Also, since the Tioga is in such good shape, everyone got their chance to drive. This means I got to spend a lot of the trip sleeping which makes the time go by like three times as fast. The 1500 miles blew by....

We arrived in Tahoe on Wednesday morning. A quick breakfast at a local ritzy little restaurant and we called up our friend Joy Williams. We knew Joy from a couple years back when she (and her boyfriend at the time) had driven cross country and ended up at Don Johnson's "Ace Run Ranch" getting an engine replaced. We hung out with them for the tournament and got to be friends. Joy also helped in the search when my dog Hyzer was lost. Anyway, Joy told us that she had a softball game at noon right at Zephyr Cove (one of the tournament courses) so we went and practiced the course and then gathered in the stands to watch Joy (and her house mate Kate) play their softball game. The Dolphin Crew rolled in just as the game was starting. As luck would have it, Joy's co-ed team was short a player. Dave volunteered. The entire game degraded into about 10 road weary disc golfers cheering and heckling Dave. Dave had some hits and scored some runs. He didn't get hurt so that was good.

There were several people staying at Joy and Kate's house for the tournament. The girls were great hosts as the place got trashed just about every night. Most of us even stayed an extra couple of days after the tournament. We went to casinos, beaches, mountains... Tahoe is a great place.

The tournament was kick ass. The layout for the final round was a little crazy and some grumbling was heard, but Jim Oates grumbled the least in route to a nice victory over Mike (I thought he didn't play anymore) Randolph. Mike has a habit of showing up at a tournament and doing well even though he's hardly been playing at all. There was a cool boat ride across Lake Tahoe with a lunch. Each morning the day was started with a real (band?) of bagpipe players and drummers. Very classy.

DiscTV was there. I saw the show last night... it's pretty good. Did you see that wild coyote with a disc in it's mouth? That disc was one of Dave Greenwell's rollers that he threw during the tournament. The coyote jumped out of nowhere to pick it up and run off with it. Brian MadDog McRee reinforced his nickname a bit and chased the coyote for about 600 feet before the lupine menace gave up it's plastic prize and trotted away into the mists. The disc was in perfect condition, albeit a little slobbery. Johnny B has footage of MadDog chasing the coyote. Pretty weird, huh?

From Tahoe, it was a short drive over to Grass Valley, California for the 1st Annual Sky Catz open SuperTour (and car show... and concert). Grass Valley and Penn Valley. Two well taken-care-of courses that play mostly through pine forests. Geoff and Johnny Lissaman do a lot of work at these courses and put their own extensive touring knowledge to work in order to keep the courses up to high standards. For the first couple days we played one course and drove down to the amazingly fun South Yuba River. Carved into the mountainside by millions of gallons of water are smoothed rocks to swim through, over, around, under (yes, under), or to jump from. Deep natural clear water swimming areas and little waterfalls that you could slide down on your butt. Climo showed us a giant rock that we would swim under. It really was amazing.