Courses

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort (Bandon Trails)

Bandon Trails was the third course to open at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort and was created by the design team of Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw. After the incredible success of Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes the expectations for their effort at the resort were very high. Unfortunately, they did not have the advantage of working with a property located along the sea, so the deck was slightly stacked against them as the comparisons to the seaside holes were sure to come. Fortunately Coore & Crenshaw rose to the occasion and delivered a course that received the same type of accolades as the previous two courses at the resort and quicky found its way onto all the Top 100 lists.

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort (Old Macdonald)

The second round of the Bandon Dunes golf trip for our group was on Old Macdonald. My last trip to Bandon Dunes was the week Old Macdonald opened back in June of 2010 and at that time the course was too new to be rated in Golf Digest’s Top 100. When the new list came out in early 2013 Old Mac debuted at number 49 which was really not much of a surprise to anyone.

As I mentioned in my Old Macdonald write up from 2010 the course is a nod to Charles Blair Macdonald who is widely considered the father of American golf. Tom Doak and Jim Urbina pulled a page from Macdonald’s playbook in that they laid out the course using their interpretations of many of the classic golf holes from Scotland. In the instances where Doak & Urbina did not use template holes they worked in their own original creations which, in my opinion, meld perfectly with the classic hole designs.

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort (Pacific Dunes)

After spending the night right outside of Eugene, OR I woke up early the next morning and started making my way towards the Coos Bay airport. I was going to drop off my rental car there and meet up with the contingent of Texas guys I was joining for the Bandon Dunes portion of my Pacific Northwest trip. It’s about a two and a half hour drive from Eugene to Coos Bay so I had plenty of time before their flight from San Francisco arrived in the early afternoon and I could make a leisurely morning out of it. My GPS gave me a number of options for getting from Eugene to Coos Bay and on my buddy Barry’s recommendation I decided to take the coastal route that heads directly west towards Florence and then south along the coast from there. While there are not a ton of ocean views, the coastal route is very pleasant and winds through some beautiful forests with the occasional ocean vista through the trees or at a roadside scenic overlook. As far as I’m concerned it beats the heck out of highway driving.

Sahalee Country Club (South/North)

We’ve all heard the expression “it’s a small world” and many of us have had those small world moments, but it never ceases to amaze me when it actually happens to me. Back in 2010 I was visiting Sand Hills with a large group, one of whom was a golfer from San Francisco named Jeff. As we played our round together I told Jeff about my Top 100 quest and said he would give my website a look when he got back home. Once Jeff checked out the website he forwarded a link to one of his co-workers in North Carolina who is a die hard golfer that he thought would enjoy the site. Turns out his co-worker is someone that I have known and gone on a couple of golf trips with dating back to before I ever started my Top 100 quest. So, I go to the middle of nowhere Nebraska to meet a guy from San Francisco who knows someone that I’ve been on golf trips with in North Carolina . . . I love that kind of stuff.

Whispering Pines Golf Club

As would be expected, the years when the list changes are always tense times for me. For the last six years Golf Digest’s Top 100 list and the courses on it have completely controlled my vacation and travel schedule, so whenever an update to the list comes out it’s a bit of a cross between Christmas morning excitement and final exam anxiety for me. Luckily, the change at the beginning of 2013 was the least damaging of the three changes that I have gone through since I began this quest, so I was pretty happy about that.