Birdies, Bottles, and Back Rubs at the Fairmont Sonoma
Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa, in the heart of California wine country, is a real corker
Pebble Beach vs. Pacific Dunes
By George Peper From the LINKS Magazine archives… They had really started to annoy me. As innocent and well-meaning as they were, they were also relentless—and so emphatic, so damned sure of themselves. For the better part of three years I had suffered their gushing pronouncements and smug sermons, nodding patiently and feigning enthrallment […]
A Golf Trip to Palm Springs, California
Set against the striking San Jacinto Mountain range, this desert oasis with year-round blue skies is a mecca for first-class golf, shopping and dining. And with more than 100 courses in the area, the problem isn’t getting tee times; it’s deciding which courses to play. Golf The Bob Hope Chrysler Classic utilizes four courses. Of […]
Fairmont Grand Del Mar Golf Resort
With its shops, restaurants and galleries, the tony oceanfront burg of Del Mar, just north of Torrey Pines, more resembles a European village than a California town. So the Fairmont Grand Del Mar, a cozy 249-room Mediterranean-style resort, is of a piece with its setting. The resort was inspired by the work of early […]
California Golf Travel: Palm Springs
I just had to see Frank’s house before leaving Palm Springs. The map said it was close to O’Donnell’s nine-holer, the first course ever built in the desert, back in 1925. Armed with a self-guided star map and a handful of Rat Pack CDs, I was plotting the perfect conclusion to my retro golf […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Restoration of a MacKenzie Treasure, Pasatiempo Golf Club
Marion Hollins was the preeminent female athlete of the 1920s, earning accolades in tennis, golf, polo and steeplechase. Hollins was also involved in real estate, and managed the development of the Cypress Point Club. She was also the visionary behind Pasatiempo Golf Club, one of the finest public courses in the country. Hollins teamed up with another giant […]
A History of Pasatiempo Golf Club
The opening of any golf course represents an ending as well as a beginning—the end of a long struggle to identify the land, to carve the course out of its raw potential. But Pasatiempo represents a more poignant end than most, because it was the last great course of the Roaring ’20s, opening just […]
