Regardless of the type of travel, expeditiousness drives the engine. When moving from place to place via air travel, the essence is in reaching the flight on time.
Once at the gate( or even better, in the seat), the traveler relaxes, knowing that the principal share of the work is now in the hands of the airplane crew. Similar, too, is the experience on the bus and the train. Driving, though, is an entirely different matter.
There was never a day where a round of golf lay at the end of a long day on the road. There were days, however, of 450-plus mile trips, fueled by the knowledge that a course waited in El Paso, or San Diego, or North Carolina, to be played the following day. If you asked me the type of drive I preferred, and the choices were flat, same, boring, pitted against undulating, diverse, interesting, I would opt for the former. You don’ t want to work too hard when 10 hours of road navigation await, and you’ re the only driver. In fact, you’ re the only person in the car! In contrast, the latter trio of adjectives is what I desired when I would pull into the car park of each golf course. I was rarely disappointed.
TEXAS( LA TORRETTA, BUTTERFIELD TRAIL, TOUR18 HOUSTON)
As vast a state as Texas is and also claims to be, the diversity of its golf courses must be considered. From the hill country of Austin to the gulf coast of Houston, to the western reaches of El Paso, the golf comes in a variety of forms and faces.
As I headed west toward Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, my path took me from Arkansas to Fort Worth, Texas, and then diagonally down toward Mexico. Instead of crossing borders to Ciudad Juarez, I decamped in El Paso, the border city across from the well-known Mexican city. Tom Fazio was brought in to design a golf course on a piece of wasteland adjacent to the international airport in town. Butterfield Trail, named for the overland mail route that stretched from Missouri to San Francisco, is a spectacular course built from an unspectacular piece of land. All around the course, for the most part, the land is flat and broken. The golf course never once feels flat, beginning with the drop-and-climb of the first two holes. Even when a fairway seems to run level, a drop-off to one side of the fairway beckons.
If you’ ve never played a Fazio desert course, and there are a fair number, you should write in a line on your golf bucket list. In part one of the Diverse Drives triumvirate, we looked at the Primm Valley courses on the California / Nevada border, 30 minutes from Las Vegas. Butterfield Trail is a stronger track than either Primm course, and that is quite a statement. Butterfield Trail is challenging when necessary, accommodating when a break is required, and always interesting. From short par fours to long par fives, Fazio’ s creativity is always evident. No other holes exemplify this better than the sequence of 14 and 15. The former is a short par five shaped around a centerline hazard near the green. The latter is a short par four whose principal feature is, you guessed it, a centerline hazard. Asking the golfer to make these choices and giving them options is the hallmark of thoughtful design.
On my return, I spent a few days in the Houston area and stopped by two distinctive designs. In the lake country north of the city is the La Torretta course, located in Montgomery. Part of a sizeable resort, the golf course was redesigned in 2007. Treelined fairways and a fair bit of rise and fall give the course a healthy bit of interest. Jeffrey Blume utilized all the original hole corridors in his redesign, but softened the green sites a bit to make the course more playable for the typical resort guest.
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