Risk Reward Holes: Casino Golf Courses
Barona Valley Ranch Resort and Casino Barona Creek Golf Club Lakeside, Calif. Best gambling hole: No. 14, par 4, 316 yards “A short tight fairway, with a mountainous natural reserve to the right. Most of the time it’s downwind, so it’s appealing. I’ve taken everything from a 2 to a 9. That’s what makes […]
A Long Weekend at The Omni Homestead, Virginia
Where to Play: Cascades: Sam Snead helped build this Golden Age William Flynn course and honed his Hall-of-Fame game on it as its first head pro. The front nine is built into the hillsides, while the back features one of the most unusual and fun finishes in golf with two par 3s bookending two […]
Wentworth Club, Surrey, England
South of London, the Wentworth Club boasts two world-class layouts. The East was laid out in 1924 by Harry Colt, the father of British course architecture. Colt ran the East through a forest of fir and silver birch that afforded a natural sense of isolation. Patches of purple heather lined the fairways and large […]
California Golf Travel: Santa Barbara
Drifting north on El Camino Real, the “King’s Highway” that links California’s 21 colonial missions, I can sense Junipero Serra’s presence in the red-tile roofs and whitewashed adobe walls all around us. My wife, for some reason, cannot. “Nobody can walk that far for that long and not collapse,” she insists. But Serra, a […]
Historic Golf Vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia
When the Brits arrived at Jamestown in 1607 to establish the first permanent English settlement in North America, they could not have had golf on their minds. Four centuries later, golf still doesn’t necessarily spring to mind at the mention of Williamsburg, Virginia, but it’s at least gained a foothold in a region more […]
Formby Golf Club, England
Scan the itinerary of any golfer on a pilgrimage to the British Isles and the chances are Formby Golf Club will be somewhere near the bottom, next to the reminder about buying presents for the family at the airport on the way home. There is one reason for this oversight and it has nothing […]
Bermuda Golf Travel
There’s only one country where nearly every course has an ocean view. But there’s much more to this British outpost than golf. Its pink sand beaches, proximity to the U.S. and balmy weather make the island an ideal escape for a memorable long weekend. Golf Mid Ocean Club, an expansive Golden Age beauty by […]
California Golf Travel: Ojai Valley Resort
When architect Jay Morrish came to Southern California in 1988 to renovate the classic Ojai Valley Inn golf course, he was greeted with a perplexing situation: Two of the original holes had vanished. The solution to this mystery, Morrish quickly discovered, was that the holes had been bulldozed during WWII when the U.S. Army […]
Golf Travel: Williamsburg, Virginia
History is at the heart of Williamsburg, from the restored 18th-century town that was the capital of pre-Revolutionary Virginia to the country’s second-oldest college. The history even extends to the golf—the area is home to one of the first island greens. But there’s far more to Williamsburg than the past: Lodging options like the […]
Royal St. David’s Golf Club, Wales
Beneath a 13th-century castle built to keep the Welsh in check, this rugged links has subjugated eager golfers for 110 years running. And now we plunge into a tract of truly wonderful duneland—tall and short sandhills, ridges and hillocks and hollows, rumpled fairways, hidden greens and long-legged rough, where skylarks breed and 12 varieties […]
