Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.
Showing 29 of 236 posts
CanadaJanice's reason for the whole trip, the Canadian Women's Senior Amateur at The Club at North Halton, just outside Toronto. A practice round with old friends, a bagpiper opening ceremony and 90-year-old Hall of Famer Marlene Streit, two hard rounds with a pair of tens, and the long drive home.
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United StatesBack on the road for the first time since the Middle East, a trip to see family and play golf, with Janice bound for the Canadian Women's Senior just outside Toronto. The drive up from Pinehurst, Cape Cod and 96-year-old Uncle Bill, and a round with brother Brian at Atkinson before heading for the border.
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United StatesOur first Washington stop was Spokane, John's family city, and we played the old Spokane Country Club where his grandparents belonged and he took his first lessons at eight. The club, now owned by the Kalispel tribe after a long road through the courts, gave us an immaculate test of golf, three moose on the fairways, and a grand resort for two nights' rest.
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United StatesFrom the caverns we made for Missoula and the Big Sky Brewery, home of Moose Drool, then took the back roads into Idaho, sharing them with a fine roadside buck, to play and write up the Idaho Club at Sandpoint, a tough, beautiful course on hard times with cliffside lots running into the millions. Then a brewery for the night and on toward Washington.
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United StatesLeaving Cedar Rapids, we pointed west toward Montana and the Bohlingers, by way of South Dakota: the falls in the heart of Sioux Falls, a Harvest Host night parked on such a slope we slept with our feet below our heads, a hilly round at Red Rock in Rapid City, and a stop at the cheekily named Naked Winery, where the wines turned out as good as their names are bold.
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United StatesWith Janice qualified, we drove to Cedar Rapids to get a look at the course that will host the USGA Senior Women's Amateur, and what a course: a 1915 Donald Ross design, restored to his original plans, with raised greens that shrug a ball off into the rough, wooden rakes and flagsticks, and suspension bridges over the streams. We found a county park nearby and booked it for tournament week.
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United StatesWe stopped in Libertyville with Pete and Bunny, friends from the Alaska trip, and Janice picked the Chicago qualifier so we could visit a while. At seventy she opened with a double bogey, laughed it off, then came home in 37 and sank a birdie putt on the sixteenth in a playoff to make it, the oldest qualifier in Chicago and bound for the USGA Senior Women's Amateur in Iowa.
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United StatesLeaving the family at Lake Sunapee, we drove west through Vermont and New York to a Harvest Host winery on Seneca Lake, then on to Cleveland for lunch with Janice's niece Kim and a fine evening in Fremont with Ari and Hedi, friends from our 2011 Alaska RV trip. A morning round at Swan Lake in Indiana, and we pointed the rig toward Chicago.
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United StatesWith the generator finally reinstalled and a fine breakfast with our Flagler Beach neighbor Frank behind us, we played Lake Sunapee Country Club, a Donald Ross course and Gene Sarazen's old home club where Janice's family once held a membership. The last days on the lake brought sailing and sculling, Connie's chicken legs, a farewell dive, and John's ribs, before we packed up Friday for a winery in New York.
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United StatesBrian rented a house right on Lake Sunapee for the whole family, and we raised the traditional martini toast at Janice's parents' grave. We won the Sunday match, then watched an oak come down across the rented pontoon boat with Steve and Marilyn aboard, mercifully unhurt. There was a wet boat ride to a closed restaurant, good food in spite of it all, and the loons calling morning and night.
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United StatesGetting into New Hampshire meant first chasing down a generator that wouldn't start, then a fine stretch of family and country: Connie and Lee in Derry, where Janice retold her 1986 Corvette adventure; the Sunapee mill and Jeff Trow, keeper of the town's cemeteries; a stream-side site at Northstar; and a glorious morning at the Country Club of New Hampshire under Mount Kearsarge.
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United StatesOn the way to the Cape we played the Rees Jones layout at Pinehills and fell in with a friendly twosome, then settled in at Harwich for our yearly visit with Janice's Uncle Bill and Aunt Margaret. Bill, ninety-one and still walking the hills, nearly shot his age at Cranberry Valley. We left not with goodbye but see you next summer, and pointed the rig toward New Hampshire.
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United StatesFrom the West Virginia highlands we hiked to Blackwater Falls in its morning sun and out the muddy mile to Lindy Point, then took the back roads north to Hershey. We played the West Course in the shadow of the chocolate factory, where Byron Nelson won his first PGA Championship in 1940, and spent our first Harvest Host night at a farm winery and brewery, with a Friday band and the Gellatly family's story.
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United StatesA June shakedown weekend of golf at Innisbrook turned up a flat that was really a second cracked Sprinter wheel, just like Billings last year, but five new wheels later the Roadtrek is finally sound. We met fun playing partners, launched a new chapter writing up courses around the country, and marked our twentieth anniversary at The Cellar in Warren Harding's old winter home. Monday morning we point north, bound for New England and then British Columbia.
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United StatesOur last day around Cooperstown brought Ellen's folks and their stray cat Hobo, a campsite beside firefighters traveling with their foster children, and a morning round on the little course where Janice once golfed with her father. Then it was over to Saratoga for a round ahead of the rain, a night at the firehouse, and the long, happy turn toward home, by way of family in New Hampshire and friends all the way down to Florida.
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United StatesWe came to Medora for a golf course, the Bully Pulpit, one of the country's top hundred public courses, set in the badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and green as Ireland after a rainy year. The name is Roosevelt's, and so is the place: it was here in the Dakota Territory that a grieving young man found himself and the love of wild country he carried into a conservation legacy still with us. Our RV neighbor, it turned out, parked his winter ice house right beside us.
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United StatesBack in the States, we skirted Glacier on Highway 2, the Going-to-the-Sun Road still snowed shut up top, and made for Whitefish, where John's family had come by train from Seattle for a high-school ski trip in 1962. We played Whitefish Lake under the ski runs, then swung south to the National Bison Range, a 1908 sanctuary, to bump along nineteen thousand acres of muddy road among bison, mule deer, and a lone elk.
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CanadaNova Scotia gave us three rounds and a new friendship. At Amherst we drew Spud and Patty from Truro, Spud raised on PEI potatoes, thirty-one years a sailor, and we liked them enough to follow Spud to his home club. A roadside repair set us back eighty-five dollars and not much time, a lakeside campground tried to park us beside two Porta Potties and lost our business, and The Lakes at Ben Eoin turned out one of the prettiest, toughest courses we've played. On to Louisbourg.
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United StatesFrom Connie and Lee's we wound through the White Mountains: golf with our friend Maurica, the Flume gorge at Franconia Notch, and the grand Mount Washington Hotel, where forty-four nations built the postwar financial order in 1944. We stayed with Janice's cousin Brian and his Donna in their light-filled forest home, then crossed into Maine for Castine, older than Plymouth, and a campsite supper of two-pound lobsters delivered for twenty-seven dollars. In the morning, the Canadian border.
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United StatesWe pulled into Derry to stay with Janice's sister Connie and her husband Lee, where Happy Hour keeps its own clock and Connie served flank steak with Stan's potatoes, her late father's recipe. Janice came a stroke shy of qualifying for the USGA Senior, we played Hidden Lake, and Connie and Lee took us to Pipe Dream, a brewery two former Marines built. Then the big day: a Make-A-Wish car show at the Budweiser plant, Lee's '66 Biscayne, the Clydesdales up close, and a brewery tour. On toward Newfoundland, with a promise to see them again at Sunapee.
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United StatesWith the Cape behind us, we made an early Sunday run north of Boston for a few rounds of golf. Cape Ann in Essex gave us a Golf Digest hole looking out to Gloucester and two friendly local couples to play with. We camped on the ocean at Salisbury Beach and played the Sagamore-Hampton course in New Hampshire, good enough to come back for, and there met Dean and Melissa Rascoe, who bought us beers after Janice gave Melissa a tip or two. Then on toward Janice's sister's.
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United StatesNorth up the coast, we skipped the stops we'd shown you before and kept to the new ones and the good golf. We leveled the RV on a hillside near Asheville and played Black Mountain, sweated through a 99-degree round on Arnold Palmer's Lonnie Poole with our daughter Kieran in Raleigh, and got a four-year-old's dawn hug at our son James's in Wind Gap. Then Rhode Island: golf at Winnapaug, and Newport's Trinity Church, where Marty and Jeff were married, leaning six degrees until steel set it straight. A good day, and on to Janice's aunt and uncle.
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United StatesSummer set us off again, north this time, aiming for Newfoundland and Janice's place in the Canadian Women's Golf Championship in August, with golf, family, and good country all the way up. First, the Saga of the Cabinet, the cherry cabinet we designed and built ourselves after our carpenter quit on us, with brother Brian's help to finish. Then our first stop, Georgia Veterans State Park on Blackshear Lake, a campsite on the water and a fine morning round. In the afternoon we waved at Plains, Jimmy Carter's hometown, with his library to come.
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United StatesAn afternoon in San Antonio took us first to the Alamo, smaller in person than a boyhood of Davy Crockett movies had led John to expect, and to the stirring story of fewer than two hundred men who held it to the last against Santa Anna. We read Colonel Travis's famous letter, ending Victory or Death, and we have kept it here in full. Then we crossed to the River Walk for lunch at the rowdy Dick's Last Resort, and the next morning played the Quarry, a beautiful course laid into an old rock quarry. Then we pointed the Roadtrek west.
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United StatesAfter a winter of golf at our home course we set off in the Roadtrek on a month-long Spring Fling, aimed west at golf, presidential libraries, and a visit with Janice's lifelong friend Marty in Sedona. The first leg took us across the Gulf South: a two-day tournament in Panama City, golf and a winning night at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, and John's first taste of New Orleans, the Carousel Bar and lovely Royal Street. We pressed on to a floating casino in Shreveport and the tales of a security guard who had seen it all. An honest tire shop in Bossier City sent us on toward Dallas.
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United StatesBack home in Flagler Beach, we watched Hurricane Matthew strengthen into a category four and aim for the Florida coast. Having ridden out Wilma in 2005, we packed the new Roadtrek and ran west to a little RV park in Carrabelle, where we found a fishing dock, a rum and Diet Coke, and a porch full of fellow evacuees. We spent the long night fearing for our old beach house and woke to the relief that the storm would pass just offshore. We came home to find the house fine but the beach road, our A1A, half washed away by a ten-foot surge.
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South AfricaYears before we started this blog, in the South African autumn of 2006, we took a trip we have never stopped talking about, planned and guided by a remarkable man named Kobus de Jonge. From Table Mountain and the Cape wineries to an Easter dinner with local farmers, the steam train to Knysna, and the Big Five at Kruger, Kobus showed us the South Africa the locals love. This is the story of the guide who became a lifelong friend, with much more of the trip still to come from Janice.
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Dominican RepublicForty years after Janice first played Casa de Campo as a young programmer on a golf vacation, we returned to the Dominican Republic for the resort's annual Senior Golf Week. A week of Pete Dye golf followed: the famous ocean holes of Teeth of the Dog, the cliffside views of Dye Fore above the Altos de Chavón village, and a turn on the Links. Old friends turned up by surprise, the pool bar did its work after each round, and when the credits were tallied Janice won the women's division and John the men's.
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United StatesThe family leg gave way to the tournament trail. We based ourselves at Pinehurst for Janice's North and South Senior, played the Donald Ross masterpiece that is Number 2, and shared a rented house with good friends. From there we worked north to the Niagara River for the history of Old Fort Niagara, a round at Niagara Falls Country Club in the company of a golfing chaplain, and the oldest nine-hole course in North America at Niagara-on-the-Lake. The trip finished across the border at the Canadian Women's Senior Amateur near Forest, Ontario, where Janice carded her 7th hole in one and a second-place finish in the Super Senior division.
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