Tee Time: 8:33am
Players: Joon, June, Sang Won
Sagewood is my favorite public country club in Korea! It’s just so nice and clean and modern. The course is also nice with a good mix of water, mountains, trees, etc. It’s just a pretty course.
It’s a little far though at around 150km from Seoul. It’s a good 1:30 to get there from Seoul and could be longer if you’re coming from the western parts of Seoul.
The green fees are also expensive! It’s around 100k krw more expensive than most other public courses.
So with that combination of distance + cost, booking a tee time at Sagewood is relatively easy compared to other golf courses in Korea. I’m fine with that. I actually booked Sagewood a few weeks ago when I had to take my boss and some partners to the golf course last minute. We ended up canceling last minute because of heavy rain but I liked that this was available as a last minute option.
There are 3 courses: dream, vision, and challenge. Each course is 9 holes so usually you play dream + vision or vision + challenge. I booked dream + vision because challenge just sounds hard…
When we met our caddie, he told us that dream is backed up and asked if it’s ok if we play vision + challenge. I asked if challenge is hard because it sounds hard and he said no…dream is actually the hardest. I’m not so sure I believe him or know what his definition of hard is but for me, hard means narrow fairways with lots of OB on both sides (so less room for error), etc. In any case, I went along with it and we played dream + challenge.
It’s been about a year since I played Sagewood but I feel like dream was easier…wider fairways and such. The roughs are pretty deep so easy to lose your ball at Sagewood so that does make things difficult though.
But overall, it was another great outing! On the par 4 hole 1 at vision, we all tee’d off. I made a pretty good second shot and it landed on the green. One of the other guys, Sang, also had a pretty good second shot and his appeared to land on the green too. The green was elevated. We both walked up to the green and I found my ball but his ball was nowhere to be found. We looked a bit more and there is was…in the hole! His first eagle ever! The caddie called it in because I think they got him a certificate or something like that.
Anyway, pace of play was good. We took a short break after the first 9 and then were out after about 4 hours and 30 min so overall we made good time. The weather was warm but not too bad. Hongcheon is far but up in the mountains so it tends to be a little cooler up there and it was. No rain, not too hot is a great day of golf!
