(Side panel archive photos updated on blog).
After a 4 year gap, yesterday brought the return of the (non-Midsummer) St Andrews outing, when 8 of us went down and played the Eden course. The set-up there is now very professional - there's a lovely clubhouse (not the one used for playing the Old/New/Jubilee courses) with outdoor seating area, and you get a nice strokesaver when you check in.
We had a spot of lunch then headed for the course. Here we all are on the first tee:
The course goes right out to the estuary - and Dan was very close to it at one hole - thankfully, the tide was out:
We had a shower early on, but, despite the gathering gloom in the distance, we managed to escape any further wet weather - and the hail storm we discovered they had in Banchory later on - and I think we all enjoyed the course, which is very playable for a group of diverse handicaps - although there were a couple of abstainers - "very short" and "a bit samey" were a couple of the remarks. I'll leave you to put names to the quotes.
Compared with £130 for the Old Course, £120 for the new clifftop Castle course and £65 for both the New and Jubilee courses, the Eden represents pretty good value at £40 per round, and still gives a nice flavour of what it's like to play links golf at St Andrews.
It was a close-run thing in the individual competition - Syd had 37 points, but Dan and Keith both came in with 38 points, with Keith just pipping Dan on countback after a fine inward half of 22 points.
Peter and Bill won the nearest the pin competitions and Keith got the longest drive. A team event was played, with the best 3 stableford scores at each hole counting. Syd, Peter, Ken and Dick scored 107 points, but Keith, Dan, Bill and I comfortably won with a total of 119 points.
There was a bit of consternation and confusion after the event, with Ken being the unwitting (and unwilling) victim of circumstances, resulting in him having to squeeze in to the back of Dan's car, with bags all over him for the short trip to Whey Pat for post-match ales. Mea culpa.
The Betty Stogs at Whey Pat was excellent, however, and, as we had finished much earlier than we thought we would, we then sloped off to the Balaka for our meal and managed to squeeze our order in just before the end of the early bird special, which gave us 3 excellent courses for £11.95.
We were all safely back in Banchory not long after 9pm - a very nice day out - it could become an annual event again.
No comments:
Post a Comment