Pros:
Isla Vista Peace Course sits in this odd, scruffy park in Santa Barbara. The park seems to exist on three or four seperate sites. The biggest and main area contains basketball courts and two soccer fields. Another semi-connected area houses holes 1-5. A third seperate area has a community garden and holes 6 & 9 and then crossing the street and you find holes 7 & 8. One thing all this areas have in common is a general scruffiness. Not quite, ghetto, but mostly a needs clean up type of scruffiness. The neighborhood is scruffy with scruffy dudes hanging out. Once again, not ghetto or threatening but not UC - Santa Barbara students. The kind of scrufficans who bring a portable punching bag to the park to practice on.
The course is your basic scruffy, older, unkempt one with old scruffy baskets, old school fiberglass tee signs which have been altered and these strange tee pads which are made of patio blocks and set in a square pattern. There is sometimes a small hill just in front of the pad. Run-ups are frowned upon here in Sruffiville.
The course is a short pitch n' putt, excellent for beginners but you know, I found it to be pretty enjoyable. There are a few simple ACE runs in the 150' range and a couple of interesting holes with a bit of challenge.
# 3 is maybe 200' and gives you the option of threading your disc through a 6' wide gap in the trees or just throwing an easy hyser around the trees. Want to make this hole way more difficult? Make it a Mando through the small gap in between the trees.
# 9 was an interesting little gem, too. It's maybe 200' but needing an anhyser throw through the trees. Then the basket is set behind three large trees with low hanging branches. You might want to try rolling your first or second shot here. Fun little hole!
Cons:
The tee pads are pretty uncomfortable to throw off if you want to have any kind of run up. Most of you probably don't require a run up on all these 175' holes.
The tee signs have been marked over by someone attempting to help. They did, in fact, help me navigate the course. I was in a rush and didn't have the luxury of looking around too much, so just having the hole # on the signs helped me quite a bit. But as a con, they don't have the distance, which I miss.
Park is scruffy!
Convoluted design which takes you all over the place. Luckily, there was one other group on the course and they pointed me in the right direction.
Course design has been changed but on-line map still shows the old layout. This would be fairly confusing if you were just following the map.
Other Thoughts:
I enjoyed this little course. Some neighboring scruffies invited me to join them in their beer pong game. I had to decline as time was of the essence but it was a nice gesture on their part. A written invitation would've have been most appreciated.
It seems as if no-one does any maintenance on this course. On one hand, that's readily apparent but on the other hand, I'm amazed that the course has held up as well as it has. No vandalized signs, no baskets appear to have been jumped on. They are scruffy but they are resilient and solider on.
This is no destination course but I found it kinda fun. I wouldn't mind throwing here on a regular basis. I might even join in the beer pong games!