I’ve had the good fortune to travel to some pretty “exotic” places with my two sisters — part of a pact we made when our mom (an intrepid globetrotter) died. The dead of a Midwestern winter seemed like a good time to reminisce about a couple of golf courses I have encountered on my travels. Now, my travel budget doesn’t cover actually playing golf at these places, but I’ve been working for you superintendents for nearly 10 years, so I rarely miss the opportunity to study the course conditions while speeding past one.
You’ll be happy to know they play golf on the Greek island of Rhodes — though, based on the one I saw on the outskirts of the city a couple of years ago, they have to play around a lot of olive trees and grazing goats. The goats may have been an unhappy accident, though somehow I don’t think so. Our taxi driver informed us that Rhodes caters mainly to British and German tourists, so it may be that these hearty golfers know what to do when their balls land in a pile of rotten olives or other, um, spoilage.
I encountered a layout of an entirely grander sort last summer in the city of Aix en Provence in southern France. It was gorgeously landscaped and lush and had guards at closed entrance gates to keep the riffraff out. We turned out to be the riffraff, as we stopped to ask a very nice guard how to get to the railway station. He didn’t understand our French any better than we understood his English, but somehow we made it to the station anyway. The chances of the guard opening up the gates to let us drive through? Zero!
I wish I had pictures for you … what was I thinking?
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