Travel Notes

Golfweek pesters me with unsolicited e-mails, which I read so that you don't have to.  Today's edition was focused on the HackGolf initiative of TaylorMade President Mark King, which fits into the category of ill-conceived attempts to expand the game by removing from it all difficulty and required skill, which I dismissively swatted away in this post.  But buried toward the bottom were two-travel-related links, which were of greater interest.

The first, which can be found here, is a Marty Kaufmann interview with Alan Maloney, proprietor of the Mount Falcon Country House Hotel outside Ballina, near the Enniscrone Links in County Sligo.  Maloney made me aware of a tourist initiative called the Wild Atlantic Way, designed to promote Ireland's 1,500 mile Atlantic coastline, from County Cork in the south up to County Donegal in the north.  This encompasses many of the great links we've spoken of previously, including Ballybunion, Lahinch, Rosses Point, as well as Carne, a more recent addition in Theresa's ancestral County Mayo.

As Maloney notes, Carne has recently added a third nine, designed by American Jim Engh, exciting because the first nine there is somewhat less interesting.  But the point to be made about the Atlantic Coast of Ireland is that it features the wildest dunesland available in all of links golf, which Scotland cannot match.  This aerial picture of Carne below will provide just a taste of the topography on offer:

Now, if they could only upgrade the roads a bit..  On our 2007 trip we covered from Waterville to Rosses Point, and it was, with the benefit of hindsight, just too much ground to cover.  Carne, for example, is at the far end of the Belmullet Peninsula, and is more than an hour and a half  from Enniscrone, the nearest links.

The second item for today is as far removed as possible from the lush Irish coast, the high plains desert of central Oregon.  In this case another Marty Kaufmann interview (and if my evil scheme to add Travelin' Joe Passov to the ranks of the long-term unemployed doesn't pan out, Marty's gig might do), this time with Alana Hughson, tourism chief for Bend, OR.  Bend is a way-cool town of approximately 80,000, with an appealing hipster-chic vibe and lots of interesting golf.  I say this with more than my usual degree of authority, because on our recent 2011 trip to Bandon we spent four days in Bend.

By far the wackiest golf in Bend is Tetherow Golf Club, a David McKlay Kidd design that came on the market just as the real estate market went into freefall.  After bursting on the scene with his design of the first Bandon Dunes course, Kidd has been associated with a number of over-the-top projects, including The Castle Course in St. Andrews and Machrihanish Dunes, though with the latter he had substantial environmental hoops he had to jump through just to get the course built.  

What makes Tetherow an oddity is that it's a classic links design, though with more than usual elevation changes, but built at 4,000 feet of altitude.  Links golf on steroids, as the naturally firm and fast turf is combined with a ball that travels ridiculous distances.  The course was visually memorable, with a number of interesting holes.  But it also had a number of holes where there seemed no place to set a golf ball down, and the curious routing made the golf course seemingly unwalkable.  But it falls into that category of golf courses I was delighted to experience, but would never be able to take on a daily basis.  

A couple of examples of the dramatic terrain at Tetherow Golf Club.  The mountains in the background are part of the Seven Sisters, which retain snow all year.

There are many other more conventional golf options in and around Bend, including two course at Pronghorn Resort and Crosswater, which was unfortunately rebuilding their greens when we were in town.  We also greatly enjoyed the Brasada Ranch Resort course, located a few miles out of town.

The Nicklaus Course at Pronghorn, above, and the 18th green at Brasada Ranch, below.

I picked our Bend detour on a lark, thinking it might be a place where Theresa could be happy (or perhaps more accurately, less unhappy) as I skied.  But I learned something important about my bride in those days, that she doesn't like dry climates, which I attribute to those County Mayo genes.