A number of things have happened since my last post:

• I have played four more courses for the first time, bringing my total to 38 (20.5%).
• The weather in New Jersey has gotten significantly warmer.
• I have moved home base for my golfing operations… which is to say I’ve moved altogether.

Looking back on this quest and reflecting on my recent move, I realized this is the fourth location from which I’ve ventured to new golf courses. Raised in Bergen County, I moved to Middlesex County with my wife-to-be in 2006, then to Somerset County in 2009, and we now call Mercer County home. With all of the moves and different home bases in mind, and knowing that I still had a long way to go in terms of New Jersey courses left to play, I wanted to get a sense of how far I’ve already gone. How far have I actually driven to play these courses?

Gathering the data told me some noteworthy things about my golf timeline.

• While I first picked up a set of golf clubs sometime in the late 1990s, I didn’t play a regulation-length course in New Jersey until 8/13/2005.
• Between 2005 and 2010, I only played seven different NJ courses. That’s an average of about 259 days between each new course.
• After a hiatus from 2010 to 2013, I’ve played 31 additional courses. That’s an average of about 36 days between each new course.
• I found out about my golf quest on 10/15/2015. Since then, I have played 11 new courses, an average of about 18 days between each new course.
• To date, the furthest I’ve driven to a golf course (one-way) is 63.3 miles.

Taking a look at each course already checked off my list and factoring in when I first played them and where I had lived at the time, I was able to calculate that I have driven a total of 1,942.4 miles (round trip). To put that in context, here are the distances to different golf landmarks across the country from my current location in NJ:

• Augusta National, Augusta, GA: 735 miles
• TPC Sawgrass, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL: 914 miles
• Whistling Straits, Sheboygan, WI: 949 miles
• Chambers Bay, University Place, WA: 2,881 miles
• Pebble Beach, CA: 2,990 miles

How far have you driven?