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Maybe it's beginners luck, but I'm amazed at how easy it is to get into somewhere you shouldn't. Take the golf course behind my apartment complex, for example. It's surrounded by a typical 7ft tall chain link fence. Walking home one day, however, I noticed that you could literally step over the fence as it passed under a bridge. This bridge passes over a drainage ditch leading out of the golf course. And ever since the GoRuck challenge I did on July 4th, I'm starting to be a little obsessed with drainage ditches. I intended just to see where the drainage ditch went, and if it linked up with any streams or stormwater drains. But I went with the flow, which led me across the course and into the facility's in-construction "Turf Care and Research Facility". Because we still haven't mastered watering grass. I find it amazing that on the one hand, you have this amazingly manicured golf course. I'm no golf course expert, but this seems like a fairly typical golf course. And right in the midst of this expensive facade, right underneath it, the landscape reveals the depths of its personality and history. It is a little hidden, as the golf course designers probably intended. But as I mentioned in my last post about Urban Exploration, part of the fun for me is seeing a little deeper into our surroundings than most ever think, or want, to look. And hey, to be fair, if I were a golfer (as I'm not) then slogging through trashy, murky drainage ditches certainly wouldn't be on my to-do list. 
If you follow the drainage ditch in the above picture back a little, in between the rows of wild-looking brush and off to the right, here's some of what you'll find: I doubt golfers dragged all this flotsam here, so I have to wonder what exactly this golf course is built on top of, or in place of. An old grocery store, perhaps? The busted concrete (perhaps from the parking lot) and half-buried shopping carts, among the rest of the rubbish, hint at that. At a certain point, the drainage ditch turns into a fairly deep, stagnant pool with no room along the banks to continue on foot. I decided that made it a pretty good time to leave. To look for an out-of-the-way spot to jump the fence, I followed the golf cart path towards the end of the course, which was closed for the evening. That's when I saw the Turf Research Facility and figured I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a look and figure out what, exactly, it was. While such a facility seems to me to be.. superfluous, to say the least, I will hold my judgment. In many cases buildings such as these are built with funds specifically earmarked for them by donors enamored with a particular project. Or maybe it's funded completely from extra golf course profits. Either one of those could be the case here. Or maybe they'll use the "research" facility to do really important things, like develop drought resistant crops that can help prevent subsequent famines in poverty-stricken parts of the globe. Doubtful, but who knows? At any rate, I enjoyed the opportunity to explore what is literally my back yard. The facility seemed nearly ready. The structure itself was nearly done, and it looked like they had just begun moving in all the fittings, accoutrements and trappings of such a facility. Until my next trespassing (kidding),
Dillon Dakota Carroll
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