Tucson Golf Courses and a little bit about Segways

I just got back from a two hour Segway tour guided by the folks down at Segway of Tucson. This was my first experience riding one of these machines but I have to say it was a pretty neat experience. They start you off with about 20 minutes of training on how to turn, go up curbs, go forward and reverse and how not to kill yourself or others during operations. It takes times to get used to the motion system but once you do its pretty easy and fun to maneuver one of these bad boys. The whole thing is controlled by where your center of gravity is. Thus, if you are standing straight up on it, you remain still. But if you lean forward, the Segway picks that up and starts to move forward. The same goes for leaning back. The more you lean in either direction, the faster you will go. Since we were beginners, they started us off with a 6 mph limiter which was later bumped up to 8 mph. The steering is done with by a motorcycle type throttle on the left handle bar. Once you get used to turning and controlling your speed, its pretty fun to operate. However, at $5k a pop, students like myself won't be able to take advantage of such an eco-friendly machine.

Denise, the owner of Segway of Tucson, talked about just how friendly they are. On a full charge a Segway can go about 25 miles. She said, electricity wise, it costs about 10 cents to get a full charge out of the lithium battery. The charge takes about 15 minutes per mile used. Some quick math will tell you that it takes about 6.5 hours to fully charge a Segway. Overall, it was a great experience, even though we probably turned more heads in those two hours than a group of naked coeds running through campus.


The other thing I did this weekend was visit seven or eight golf courses all over Tucson for Ray and my's special project. We found out that a lot of courses are using reclaimed water now. The Forty-Niner course was one of these and they have been using reclaimed water for a year now, if I remember correctly. It took a good amount of time to set up the operationg since they had to build a pipe from the Santa Cruz River all the way to where they are which is a few miles east of Houghton. Pretty intense.


All of the city course, including Randolph, El Rio, Silverbell, are also on reclaimed water. We learned that every year around this time, every course has to reseed every hole. That's why you will see in some of the pictures I took that some course are browning and others are a happy green. Del Lago, one of the courses we visited, is absolutely gorgeous right now. They had just finsihed the reseeding process and used reclaimed water to do so. Check out the pics!