The Greatest Mom and Daughter

South Thompson Inn, Kamloops, BC --  This is truly a golf vacation.  You can tell.  We get up in the morning and have a breakfast that anticipates a full day on the golf course.  We get dressed in our golf togs.  We head off to hit some practice balls at the driving range.  We play a round – four or five hours, depending on the venue and the fullness of the tee-sheet.  We have lunch at the club house, looking out over the ninth or 18^th green, critiquing the approach shots, the bunker shots and the putts of the performers in front of us.  We return to the hotel room and take a nap.  We get up in time for a night cap and some discussion – about today’s golf game, of course – and then fall to sleep with dreams of doing it all over again. 

Life should always be so simple.

And golf should always be as fun as it was yesterday.  Compared with Tobiano, which beat us up and spit us out the day before, Rivershore Golf Course was a walk in the park.  Laid out in the floodplain next to the South Thompson River, it was mostly flat, and mostly predictable.  The slope was higher than Tobiano, but it didn’t feel like that.  And, like most Robert Trent Jones courses, it was set up to be hard to par, but easy to bogie.  And, after the sage-brush infested gullies of Tobiano, we were looking for something that gave us a change to bogie a few holes.

It turned out, I bogied the entire round, which for me is a fine score.  Ben shot better than he did the day before, too.  But what really made the round fun were the women we played with.  Diana and her 71-year-old mother, Pat, who live just east of Kamloops, had won a round at Rivershore in a tournament in their local golf league championship.  We called Pat "mom" all day, and she seemed fine with that.  She tolerated Ben’s colorful language, and oohed and awed at our good shots.  Meanwhile, she hit the ball predictably down the middle of the fairway – not far, but far enough to par a couple of the  par 3s, and double bogie most of her way through the round: a respectable showing for a tiny woman with a couple fractured vertebrae.  

Generally, we enjoy the people we are paired with at random.  Only once did we get hooked up with a total jerk – one that was so notorious that the starter caught us at the turn to apologize for making us play with him.  Most people are great, and either they play no better than we do, or they tolerate our duffs and shanks, probably remembering how they played after just a few years of weekend golf.  Still, Pat and Diana were just the antedote we needed after our tough round at Tobiano.  Wherever you are, mom and daughter, thanks for rescuing our golf vacation and giving us one of the most enjoyable days of golf we’ve had in – oh – at least a week.