Golf in Guatemala

Hello everyone, now that I am back on the road again I will be posting more regularly. Right now I would like to let you know how my trip went down in Guatemala. I was so excited about my trip to Guate (that's what I will call Guatemala from now on) that I started brushing up on my Spanish by listening to a free podcast from iTunes. In the end the trip did not let me down, although the golf side of things could have gone much better I really enjoyed my time there and would do it all over again even if the outcome was the same. I started off the week on not such a great note, but I was up for anything. The only flights that they have from LAX to GUA are red eyes, this is not good for me since it is very hard for me to fall asleep on planes. But once I arrived to Guate everything was fine, I was tired but it worked out okay. For the first couple of days things were very routine, wake up early get down to the lobby wait for the shuttle go to the golf course play a round of golf with some practice before and after. Come back to the hotel from the golf course and have some dinner that the tour had set up for us somewhere in town.

Things were going good I felt confident about my game all around, I even hired a caddie for the week that was at some of my practice rounds so i could get to know him before the tournament. I felt prepared. The first round of the tournament I had an early draw, my first tee time was at 8:20, I get to the course with plenty of time to spare and realized that it was already windy. Usually, here at this course it is calm in the mornings and in the afternoons the wind picks up. I still felt confident about my game and my ability to play in windy conditions, but I made a couple of mistakes early underestimating the wind, and all of a sudden my confidence is shattered, not because I started out bogey, bogey, but because I had gone long on my approach shots on both hole 1 and 2. Doubt started to creep in my mind, but I tried to stay strong. I fought hard all day, but just wasn't hitting the ball very well, relying very heavy on my short game to save me, which it did but not enough. I shot a 77 on the first day, which sounds pretty bad, but under the circumstances I was only one shot of the cut line. I figured that if on the second day I could go out and shoot a couple over par I would make the cut. Well my intentions were good, but I was not able to execute my plan the way I wanted to. In the second round I hit the ball better than the first round but putted and chipped much worse, not getting up and down one time all day. That makes for a very long and frustrating day. In the end I shot a 81 the second day for a total of 158 and the cut was 152. I really felt like a good opportunity was lost to make a cut there, but there were some important lessons I learned there that week.