A golf road trip visiting a top course in each state

Or how to hit 48 top public golf courses in 48 states in 14,003 miles.

My recently released tool Golf Trip Router allows you to build a (near)  optimal route between top public courses in the U.S. for your golfing road trip.  What about building the best trip to hit one course in every state ? It’s awfully ambitious, but faint heart never won something or other.

This trip can be built in the “Build Your Own” option in the tool itself, but I thought I’d capture it for here for ease of viewing.  The tool itself has to make a compromise between returning the best trip and returning a trip in reasonable time,  but for this post I have the luxury of running it longer offline to produce what should be the best trip.

As mentioned in the site itself, only golf courses in the continental United States are available in the tool. For this exercise of building a trip to visit one course in each state, I had to first add a few courses to make sure each state was represented, and then I had to designate a “best”course in each state. I tried to do this with a consensus of various ratings, but there will likely be people who disagree with the top course in each state; you have to draw a line somewhere. Note that the best course in each state was not chosen to help the overall trip being shorter, but just on the consensus ratings.

Here is the trip as calculated by the Golf Trip Router.  The trip visits 48 courses and requires 14,003 miles of driving. Note as with all trips from the tool, it is a loop, so it could be started from anywhere as long as the order is maintained. The distance listed on a line in the grid is the driving distance from the previous line’s course to the course on the line (for the first line in the list it is the distance from the last course in the list to the first).

Best in every state 14003

Best every state 14003 itin

Attribution: I use a version of  the code provided by Randal Olson’s site (http://www.randalolson.com/2015/03/08/computing-the-optimal-road-trip-across-the-u-s/) to build the the trips. Additionally, I use d3.js and Leaflet to draw produce the maps.