Greetings from Pittenweem on a sunny Tuesday morning. Yesterday's Met Office forecast proved to be quite prescient, which shockingly isn't always the case here. Or anywhere.
The morning gave little evidence of what was to come, sunny and blustery, with darker clouds visible off to the Southeast. The wind direction didn't seem to be bringing that visible trouble our way, yet cloud cover increased quickly as we got our round underway. The forecast had wind speeds in the mid-teens, and that seemed consistent with what we found out there, making an already difficult track a survival test.
On the Balcomie, I prefer the back tees, there being stretched to an underwhelming 5,867 yards. It does play far harder than that, with the substantial elevation changes and general quirkiness pr0viding defenses to scoring. Those Balcomie back tees (here the whites are the Championship tees, yellows are the members' or society tees) carry a course rating of 69.7 and a slope of 117. On the Craighead, the yellow tees, at 6,193 yards, are all I need, and seem underrated at 70.8 and 130, respectively. Their yellow tees stretch to 6,656 yards (73.1/135), but I feel no need to punish myself to that extent. After all, punishing your humble blogger remains Employee No. 2's realm....
It's a struggle to define exactly why it's such a difficult course, but I shall try to explain over the next week and a half, as much to myself as to my readers. The first aspect to address is to understand the dilemma faced by Gil Hanse in his first solo design. With the Balcomie topping out short of 6,00 yards, the club logically wanted its second course to be more substantial, a place suitable for Open Championship qualifying and other such events, but the property available is a tiny 114 acres. Thus, Gil shoehorned it into the available land, but the course is necessarily tight, almost claustrophobically tight, at least at certain spots. Ironically, setting aside the frustrating Par-3 thirteenth, I find the Par-5's to be the most maddening holes out there.
Yesterday's golf can be summarized quite quickly, it being of widely variable quality and relatively short duration. Not much photography was involved, though I did catch Thresa playing a couple of typically linksy bump and runs, here into the fourth green:
And here into the tenth:
On the latter, her ball actually bounced through the bunker, a great break she didn't seem to have appreciated as much as one might. Like Balcomie, Craighead seems to concentrate its short, fiddly holes in the middle of the round, this being one that perhaps I'll talk about in greater length the next time we play.
Back to that fourth hole for just a second, which used to feature the most dangerous ball washer in Scotland, but now looks quite tame:
Unfortunately, despite reviewing my 2023 and 2024 trip posts, I did not find one of my old photos of this spot. In prior years, those two gorse bushes encroached quite close to the ball washer, and the player had to risk the peril of contact with the gorse to clean his ball, its own little Sophie's Choice moment. Now we see safetyism run amok.....
One last funny moment, just to prove that, after bragging on my play yesterday, I'll also share the face plants inevitable here. The tees for the eleventh hole can be seen against the stone wall in that photo of Theresa playing the tenth. The hole plays uphill slightly and is governed by an unusual feature:
Ancient Walls
Its not just the dramatic vistas that make a round on Craighead so inspiring. The course follows and bisects the remnants of medieval revetted drystone walling. Hanse carefully and expertly integrated these ancient walls into his design.
One plays over these stone walls on two holes, here on the eleventh, as well as the Par-5 fifteenth. Here the wall is a mere 200 yards from the yellow tees, and my history has been to leave my drive way short of the wall, making the second shot to a tiny green that much more challenging. Yesterday I gave that HL3-wood a go, but it put me smack against the wall. Since I didn't fly seven hours to lay up, we had some fun with it:
Oops! Not really sure if you can make out the ball, but if only ancient stone walls were built at the angle of revetted bunker faces....
At that point our matched was all-square and, on cue from the Met Office, it began to rain as we hit our tee balls on No. 12. The forecast had indicated that the rain would be consistent, and we were at a critical juncture, because off the twelfth green we would make a right turn and head further away from the clubhouse, not to mention the necessity of dumping two golf balls into the Firth on No. 12. So, all it took was a nod, and your humble blogger scurried to collect our golf balls from the fairway and we headed home, the consistent rain on the drive home validating our decision to remain dry.
The view later that afternoon from the window of our bedroom aerie further confirming our wisdom:
We quickly ducked into the local bakery after arriving home for a coffee and sausage roll (they hadn't received their delivery when Theresa went in before golf:
As we finished dinner, Theresa got an amusing push notice from her phone, indicating that it would begin raining in 23 minutes and rain for a half-hour, so we quickly mobilized for our traditional after-dinner stroll. The sky was predictably dark, with the only brightness visible in the West towards St. Moans.
We opted to walk home via the High Street, a less scenic routing but offering slightly different views of Pittenweem and our home for these two weeks:
That brown stone building with the orange roof (orange, after the Glenmorangie tour and Harrison Ford videos, being the official color of our 2025 trip), is Eider House, our go-to rental house. The white house with blue shutters is Herring House, which we had rented for 202 but never got to occupy. All of this I covered in
this post from last summer.
I know I've Wynd-blogged previously, but our path home from the High Street takes us part-way down West Wynd. We do most of our walking along the water, the road that rings the harbor and the waling pathway from the end of the road towards the tidal pool, all part of the 183-kilometer
Fife Coastal Path.
Running up the hill from the harbor are a series of roads/paths, called Wynds, looking like this:
Continuing down the wind in the above photo would take us to that paved walkway you've seen in countless photos, but we can make a sharp left for a direct line home:
Through a wooden gate to the left is our outdoor space, where you've seen us eating dinner outside, as well as hanging laundry on Sunday.
Care for a couple of notes on managing life in Pittenweem, in this case with a common thread involving technology? More accurately, these are tales of a 70-year old man managing 21st century technologies, with quite mixed results. As always, we could sue a teenager with us, but that's not to be.
The first involves our car, a quite lovely BMW X-1, pictured below. We now use Sixt for car rentals, and our small sample size indicates that they're better organized (Inverness Airport has its own unique issues, which I'll not delve into because we pick up our car there but we arrive by ground) and quite a bit cheaper, while providing better and newer cars.
Last year we ended up in an Audi A5, perfect for me in that I drive an Audi at home, and all the buttons looked familiar. Sixt no longer stocks Audis, so it was a Beemer for us. My issue is less with Sixt than it is with modern cars, which have largely eliminated physical knobs for touchscreen displays, which is an awkward fit in rental cars.
We drove the three hours from Inverness to Pittenweem struggling to control the most basic features in the car, mundane stuff like volume and temperature controls. Idiot that I am, the volume control issue should have been readily solved using the volume control buttons on the steering column, but halfway down my butt started to get very warm, and we gradually realized that the seat heater was comin on automatically, though you'll think me mad to suggest that, no?
As an aside, we seem a magnet for crazy things like this. In Anchor House, the house-from-hell that we mistakenly rented two years back, we were woken up several times in the middle of the night when the TV came on through spontaneous combustion..... the only solution was to unplug it.
In any event, it turns out that we're not THAT crazy:
Automatic Climate Control:
BMW's automatic climate control system is designed to maintain a comfortable cabin temperature. This system utilizes various sensors to monitor the interior and exterior temperatures and adjusts the heating, cooling, and ventilation accordingly. In colder weather, this can lead to the automatic activation of seat heaters when the system determines it's necessary to reach the desired cabin temperature.
Temperature-Based Activation:
Users can also configure specific temperature thresholds for seat heating and ventilation. When the outside temperature drops below the set point, the seat heaters will automatically engage. Similarly, ventilated seats can be set to activate when the temperature rises above a certain level.
The automatic activation settings for seat heating and ventilation are typically found within the iDrive system's climate control menus. Users can usually access these settings by navigating to "Vehicle Settings" > "Climate Control" > "Climate Control Rules" or similar menu options.
Guess what I'll be working on once I finish this post? I don't know what the answer is, but it's a lot to expect someone renting a car for a few days to have to dig deep into the settings menu just to avoid a sweaty behind.
My second technological foray is seemingly on a better arc, though it's best in these matters to always eschew the cockiness. The underlying subject here is the Open Championship beginning Thursday, which is at one of Madam and my favorite courses on the planet (although, to be fair, we only 16/18ths of it). Tow years ago I streamed the final round from Hoylake, so that in itself isn't above my capabilities (or, at least, wasn't two years ago). But the bigger question is whether I can improve upon my laptop's 15.6" inch screen, and it seems that perhaps I can.
After golf yesterday, I confirmed that the LG TV in the den, while smaller than optimal, is at least a Smart TV. Using Google and my well-honed technical skills, in shockingly short order I was able to successfully cast or mirror a YouTube video from my iPad onto the TV. Just to make sure, I did it later as well, and we watched an episode of Slow Horses on AppleTV+. For reasons I can only speculate about, Netflix, Prime and HBOMax content would not play, but Apple did.
SkySports has the coverage, though it's also available through something called NOW, so I still need to figure out that piece of it, though I still have 48 hours to subscribe. I think the bride was quite shocked that I could figure this out, and I'll admit to a lack of confidence myself. Hopefully the technology will not fail us, as this is an Open I very much need to see.
Cheers for now.
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