I resolved this year to take more walks on golf courses. After splitting a couple two three some bottles of wine with neighbors on New Year’s Eve, the resolution was quantified as the need to play golf once a month, whether I wanted to or not.
This past Saturday I went out to Nortwood Golf Club in Monte Rio with Mark, scratch golfer, and Jim, pretty good golfer. I was playing the role of Tim, bad golfer. I’ve studied for that role for a long time of not-golfing, devoting hours to to the study and practice of not-golfing.
The course is a 9-hole, set among redwood trees where Alister MacKenzie did his dirty work. Narrow fairways are framed by large, extremely tall, wide and golf-ball-ricocheting coastal redwoods. The effect of playing there is a mix between the Ewoks scene in Return of the Jedi and skeeball.
I have your ball...
Originally built as part of the world-controlling, Illuminati/Knights Templar/DaVinci Code* enacting Bohemian Club’s recreation area (their grove is nearby) the course is open to the public and very informal. This past outing there were people in jeans and shorts.
Mark and Jim both played well, though Jim had to put his clubs down after 6 holes because his back was hurting him as he spent the morning wrestling with his kids. Mark and I played the whole 9, and we had fun on the final hole, a par 5 back to clubhouse (10th hole?) where you just seem to hit past redwoods for days.
The course was a bit wet, this being a redwood grove in winter, so while the sand traps weren’t an issue, the wet parts of the rough tended to swallow your ball in mud. Fine with me- easier to find the ball when it’s in a crater in the grass than when it skids off into nowhere.
After the round and over drinks and serve-your-own hot dogs at the bar, I was delighted to find I had managed to shoot two-over-par.
On each hole.
I’ll be playing a new course each month – we have some nice golf in the Sonoma Wine Country, and the way I shoot, hopeully we have some nice golfers, too. Here’s a list of Sonoma golf courses open to the public.
*The Da Vinci Code, of course, was the simpleton’s version of Foucalt’s Pendulum.
During a hot summer day this would be a great place to play and escape the hot sun. This is not a long course but you have plenty of obstacles to play around (100 foot redwoods). For Tim’s first time out this year he did pretty well, he is still looking for the ewoks.