Ho-Hum Sun Rivers

Kamloops, BC - Sometimes it’s not the golf course, it’s the golfer.

That was certainly the case on Tuesday, when Ben and I teed off at Sun Rivers, a golf course surrounded by housing developments on the rims outside of Kamloops.  The course was fair enough, but my drives weren’t.  We didn’t close the day with a terrible score, but it wasn’t what we should have had on a wimpy little 116 slope.  Oh, well, there’s always tomorrow…at least when you’re on a golf vacation.

But while it wasn’t the cause of my lackluster round, Sun Rivers certainly doesn’t inspire great play.  It was named one of Canada’s best new courses in 2003, but it’s hard to see why. Winding back and forth in hair-pin curves, the cart path defines 18 holes that are tiered up and down steep slopes lined with houses.  Many holes offer a full view of Kamloops below – and there aren’t many folks who would say that’s a really special thing  (See “Not our nicest town” blog from June 22), unless they really like power lines and industrial sprawl. The back nine was less house-bound than the front nine, but you never get the feeling that the houses are here because of the course, rather than the other way around. This was a course built with housing development in mind.

The course doesn’t give up its secrets easily.  Several holes had blind tee shots (see photo above), and a couple of holes provided no view of the green from the middle of the fairway, either.  The course book offered some clues to good placement, but that usually only helps the second or third time around a course.  As a newcomer, it’s a crapshoot. 

The only thing other than the touted “view” worth mentioning about Sun Rivers is the restaurant, where diners on the deck can watch putters and chippers on the practice green and offer cheers or jeers as appropriate. (We mainly cheered, not having proven ourselves much better in our round.)  The food was tasty and inexpensive, and the waitress cheered us up after our mediocre round with her chipper attitude. 

At least the weather held.  We hope for the same tomorrow. 

 

 

Canadian food

Ben has been a man of a certain age for a couple of years, and with that comes all kinds of health worries - in particular, prostate cancer and all the health effects of high cholesterol.  After some cajoling, he finally went to the doctor a week ago to get the appropriate tests.  The results were amazing. Best of all, no signs of prostate cancer.  But the cholesterol test was the zinger:  For a guy who eats eggs, bacon, butter, cheese and steak, and thinks that those are the five food groups, his cholesterol was low.  Not just low, amazingly low.

Therefore, when we ordered lunch at the clubhouse the other day and he ordered poutine and pogos, who was I to say it was bad for him?  His massive intake of fatty foods apparently does him no harm.

I think one of Ben's favorite things so far about Canada is poutine.  Pogos is probably second.  Poutine is that uniquely Canadian combination of French fries and cheese curds covered with brown gravy.  I have no idea where the dish originated, and no one I have asked seems to have the answer.  It's like asking a citizen of the USA where meat and potatoes came from.  They just are.  I personally can't imagine eating poutine, but then, I don't have to.  

Pogos are a Canadian brand of little corn dogs.  Ben got six of them in his order.  Pleasantly brown and greasy, they seemed all puffed up and happy sitting in a little family-like circle on his plate next to a dish of poutine.  A happy meal for a guy who doesn't need to worry about his cholesterol.

All I can imagine is that Ben is much happier with Canadian food than he would be with, say, Russian food.  I can't imagine him quite so happy about borscht and cabbage.

Today, as we were relaxing after our round of golf, he looked out over the wide Thompson River valley and proclaimed, "I like Canada."  I think poutine has something to do with that.

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. 

"Not our nicest town"

Kamloops, BC - Standing on the tee box on the 13^th hole at Tobiano on Sunday, we chatted with a couple of guys from Vancouver, who like us, were waiting for the backlog of golf foursomes to clear the teebox and the first landing area before teeing off.   As usual, we exchanged “where are you froms” and talked about the golf games to come and those just past. 

“Kamloops isn’t one of our best towns,” one of the men warned us, when we explained that we were staying in Kamloops and making it the central location for our five-day golf vacation.  With that warning in mind, we drove into Kamloops after our round, a little leery about what we’d find.

I expected a boarded up downtown, like those we’ve become used to in mid-sized towns in the Midwest, where strip malls and WalMarts have replaced downtown shopping districts.  But, to our surprise, downtown Kamloops was bustling.  Partly, that was due to the Jehovah’s Witness convention that was just letting out of the downtown convention center as we were arriving.  But, even without the extra folks dressed in their Sunday best wandering out of the big hall to their cars, the town was apparently more than surviving.  We walked past several restaurants and shops on the main street, an old, historic hotel and a historical museum, all open on Sunday as a regular practice.  We stopped at Kelly O’Bryan’s, a typical Irish pub and restaurant, for dinner, and the place was jammed.

 After that nice surprise, we drove out of town, and Ben discovered his “Big Letdown.”  Canada might be a nice place, but it’s also a place where beer costs $15 an eight-pack (yes, eight, not six) for Molson Canadia – a regular lager along the lines of Coors or Miller.  Obviously, Ben couldn’t live here – at least not on his salary. 

 

 

Gum-drop golf

Kamloops, BC – As we think about the 20 years that we’ve been married, Ben and I believe that golf has helped us stay together.  It’s a sport that men and women can compete equally – thanks to the “forward” tees – and one in which you don’t have to compete against each other, unless you want to.  There’s plenty of challenge just competing against yourself and all those little demons in your head, not to mention the bunkers, water hazards, cliffs, bushes, trees and blind doglegs that course designers throw at you. 

Sometimes, of course, golf can also test the marriage, and does so often.  It’s not easy to watch someone nearly burst apart at the seams over a wicked slice or another lost ball or a chunked chip or a horrible putt.  But, we have learned over the past six years that we’ve been playing this game, that our outbursts of anger and vitriol are just part of the game. I’ve learned to not let Ben’s string of f-words interfere with my composure, and he’s learned not to put his hand on my knee and try to comfort me when I’m pouting and pissed about the last hole…or holes. 

Yesterday was that kind of day. 

On the first golf day of our golf vacation in British Columbia, we woke early and drove west, past Kamloops, up into hills pitted with salt ponds where the mineral soups from the fractured rocks below seep up into low pots, turning the circular depressions snow white.  After about 40 miles, we dipped back down to the river to Tobiano, Canada’s No. 1 new golf course in 2009, according to Golf Digest. 

The course is something to see.  The gum-drop shaped, sage-covered hills that line the wide river were dotted with patches of rich grass of fairways and greens, as if the tops of every other gum drop had been flattened and painted green.  The new club house and restaurant provided floor to ceiling views of the river and the flattened gumdrops.  We watched the U.S. Open while eating breakfast and gazed at the daunting landscape cum golf course.

Although the slope of the course – only 119 from the forward tees and 125 from Ben’s – didn’t indicate that it would be a tough course, the view from the clubhouse said differently.  As we warmed up on the driving range, it was clear that wind was going to play a factor in the day’s game.  And a few quick putts on the practice green also gave fair warning that the fast, rolling – dare I say rollercoaster – greens would be tricky.

We started our round with a decent par four, down wind.  We had decent drives from the tee and decent lies on the fairway, and fairly routine second shots.  But the tough approach and sloping green wrested a couple of extra strokes from each of us, and we ended up with triple and quadruple bogies.  I will spare non-golfers the rest of the details of the round, but suffice it to say that long carries over deep, sage-brush lined gullies, and long shots into a steady 30 mph wind kept us struggling all day.  We each lost far more than the usual number of balls, and Ben exercised more than his usual amount of f-word creativity.  In the end, I was about 14 strokes long of where I should have been, and Ben ended up a good 7 strokes above his usual game. I suggested stopping at the club house for lunch, tempted by the smell of grilled burgers, but Ben would have nothing to do with it.  “I want to get out of here and never come back as long as I live,” he said, leaving little room for doubt.

Tobiano might be the best golf course of 2008, but I don’t think it is the most fair.  There is little room to bail when shots aren’t perfect, and no escapes for those who don’t want to challenge the gully gods.  The wind, which seemed to blow straight down from the Cascades with nary a tree to slow it down, was constant and dreadful.  It was one of those courses where you don’t leave saying, “I’m glad we played it even if we didn’t play well.”  Frankly, we could have done without the pain.

But, that’s golf.  Every course isn’t for everyone.  Some folks need the challenge of target practice – hitting little golf balls onto tiny gum-drop hill landing spots and putting across greens with slope greater than Cherry Street in Seattle.  But frankly, I’m out to play for fun, and Tobiano simply wasn’t fun. 

 

 

Marking 20 years in ... Canada?

South Thompson Inn, Kamloops, BC -- At the end of May, Ben and I passed the 20 year mark in our marriage, which may not seem like a lot to other folks, but if you were inside this marriage, you’d be really amazed.  (Okay, I just wrote that for my husband.  A bit of a tweak, you know.)  Actually, there are members of my family who are amazed, I am sure, although they have the good graces not to mention it, often.  

Truth be told, I can’t imagine what the past 20 years would have been like without him, but I guess that’s always true of any portion of our lives. We can’t imagine a different path or outcome, aside from engaging in fantasy, like some journalists-cum-novelists we know who have managed to not only rewrite their lives, but improve themselves immensely in the process.

So what does this have to do with travel?  We were too busy at the end of May to take a proper vacation to celebrate this milestone, and instead, planned a trip to Kamloops, BC – yep, Canada – for the end of June, and here we are.  It’s a bit like going to Grand Junction, Colorado, for a vacation.  Looks like it, anyway. So it probably deserves an explanation.

Kamloops wasn’t our first choice, really.  A couple of years ago, back when the market was flying high and we were flush with cash, we thought we’d take one of those super-fancy little-boat cruises around New Zealand and play all of the incredible coastal golf courses for two weeks, and maybe get in a hike or two.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner and daily golf, all for just a tidy little $11,000 each. 

But a market crash later, we’d scaled down our plans to a trip to Bandon, Oregon, for a week of golf on the area’s famed links.  Then, a recession-led pay cut later, and we scaled down again, finding that we could play the No. 1 new course in Canada for 2008, and four other courses, and stay in the nicest places in the region if we went the same distance from our Seattle home – but north and east instead of south and west. And it would cost us half as much as Bandon, and about one-eighth of our fantasy New Zealand cruise. So, here we are in Kamloops, BC., a place a golfer we met today called, “not one of our nicest towns in Canada.”  We’ll see when we take a trip into town later.

We flew to Kelowna, and after some self-inflicted hassles trying to get the rental car (you have to use the right key for the right car, dummies), we drove north out of town, remarking how the territory looked like parts of Colorado.  We pulled off the freeway just past the town of Lake Country, and followed typical wine-country roads that wound around vineyards and then plunged in big hairpin curves down to Lake Okanagan.  We had lunch at Gray Monk Winery with a spectacular view.

After lunch, we sampled the winery’s pinot and gamay noir at the complementary tasting, settling on a bottle of the gamay.  We asked the cashier if we could buy the wine in Seattle, and she wrote down the name and phone number of the distributor in Seattle for us, so we can find it at home if we still like it enough to pay $20 for a bottle later.

We chugged our way about half-way back up to the highway (we’re driving a Chevy Cobalt, you see) and stopped at the Arrowleaf Winery, where preparations were under way for a wedding on the winery grounds that evening.  Ben suggested moving along without the tasting, once he found out it cost $2 a person, but I convinced him it wasn’t REAL money (just Canadian), and it was the only other winery we would visit that day, out of about four dozen in the area.  So, we paid our fee and sampled some more pinot and blends, and agreed on a zweigelt, an Austrian red.  My previous experience with Austrian wines has been limited to gruner veltliner, so it was nice to discover a new dry red wine to add to our options.

We then drove through country that changed from thick pine forests to craggy, folded hills covered sagebrush and jack pines that evoke the western-most counties of Colorado and the dry steppes of central Montana.  Diving down to the Thompson River, we passed ranches and horse farms until we spotted our hotel across the river on the left.  We arrived at the gate of the South Thompson Guest Ranch, wondering if we’d made the right choice.  The equestrian center bespoke the “horsey set,” which neither of us can identify with, and the sprawling inn was swarming with wedding guests who filled the rooms and porches in anticipation of two weddings that were taking place here that night. 

We took to our room, a pleasant wood-floored, wainscotted room with a full view of the river and surrounding hills, and sets of wicker chairs on the balcony.  Horses and paddocks behind us and only the flowing river in front of us, we forgot about the horsey set and the weddings and settled in for a comfortable night.

Tomorrow, we start our golf adventure with Tobiano, the No. 1 new golf course in Canada in 2008, a little worried about the weather.  We’ll see what happens.

 

 

 

 

Why I don't fly so much anymore

For years, I was the most frequent leisure traveler of nearly anyone I knew who also worked for a living. So, what’s going on? Why am I not updating this blog very often? Have I been grounded?

I started this travel blog right before I quit traveling. I didn’t quit entirely – but certainly I cut down on the number of vacation and leisure trips that used to dot my calendar like bumps on seersucker. Why? I went back to work, which entails a fair amount of business travel, which I don’t like to write about. And we bought a house in the mountains 80 miles away from Seattle. That limits both my opportunity and appetite for getting on a plane and flying away for fun.

Lately, I’ve been thinking I’ve been limiting myself too much. I haven’t been to South America in four years. Ben and I never go to Hawaii anymore; if we want to go someplace warm, it’s too easy to slip down to Palm Springs where we already have clothes, golf clubs, bikes – everything we need. No luggage required.

But as I say, I recently started to wonder if this is healthy. I came across a travel diary my friend Janet gave to me four or five years ago. Empty. On a desk, I uncovered a beginner’s guide to Slovak – evidence of a once-planned-then-cancelled trip to the mountains of Slovakia and the beer gardens of the Czech Republic. Janet has been e-mailing me lately about fantasies of a quick trip to Zuleta in Ecuador. Ben and I picked up brochures about golf and wine tasting around Mendoza, Argentina. It’s starting to get to me…I need some air under my feet and some serious non-American cultural immersion.

Well, until the past weekend, anyway. Two consecutive maintenance-caused flight cancellations with Alaska Airlines reminded me how little fun it is to get on an airplane anymore. A flight that should have taken 2 and a half hours - at the most - turned into a 22-hour ordeal – just trying to get home from Southern California. The sleep deprivation lasted for days, and I lost my nice $300 Sennsheiser head phones along the way. And wasn’t it just the last flight from Phoenix when the airline lost my golf clubs, which were checked alongside Ben’s, which arrived fine?

It’s as if the airlines are trying to drive away traffic. And, I can’t imagine I’m alone feeling this way. When this flight-hassle fatigue is combined with the coming “depression-syndrome” ethic of non-consumption on the part of consumers, I can’t help but think the heyday of air travel in the U.S. is over. Airlines that want to stay in business pay attention to preventative maintenance (get those planes healthy!), customer service and responsiveness (please tell me why my flight is delayed four hours?), creature comforts (is it really the swine flu that mandated the removal of pillows or penny-pinching?), and convenience (don’t make me drag my checked bag across the airport for loading. Don’t you have conveyer belts?) . But I don’t see that happening.

The TSA’s arbitrariness and rudeness seems to have lessened lately. But undoing that negative isn’t going to be enough when obliterated by increasingly budget-minded airline stinginess that leads to more discomfort and more and more delays.

Thank goodness Ben and I decided to drive to Canada for our big golf trip this summer instead of flying. We may actually get there on time. And we may actually have our clubs when we arrive.