Bonus Chapter 4: Use an Open-Faced Club! The Sand Wedge!
Mmmm...open-faced club sandwich...
I’m afraid I must be the bearer of bad news.
For years, one of our preferred hotels has been the Holiday Inn Express. Usually it’s either that or the Hampton Inn, as we generally find them to be the better of the chains offering clean rooms and free breakfasts for large families like my own.
(Embassy Suites is our favorite, but they’re usually too expensive.)
Frankly, the Holiday Inn Express is fine, but it’s generally like every other hotel chain. The one thing that put them above the others in our minds was the fact that they served cinnamon rolls as part of their standard breakfast. Nice, big, warm, gooey cinnamon rolls. They were great. We were always tempted to steal a tray and take it with us on the road, but of course we are fine, upstanding American citizens who would never stoop to that level. Also, other people are watching us, so it’s easier to go up and grab extras one at a time.
The rolls looked like this:
(Photo borrowed from the interwebs. I’ll give it back later.)
And now I’m sorry to say that the cinnamon rolls are no more. Or rather, they have been replaced with a “new and improved” version in a partnership with Cinnabon that is definitely new but in no way improved and probably saves the hotel chain a few nickels. You might hear “Cinnabon” and think this isn’t such a bad thing, but they don’t bear any resemblance to the Cinnabons you overpay for in malls and airports. These appear to have been made from the leftover scraps of those other, better rolls. It’s a lump of dough with a tiny sprinkle of cinnamon and a glop of white goo on the top. I’m having a hard time finding a photo of the new ones to show you. It’s almost like they’re embarrassed about this new travesty.
This shot makes them look more appealing than they actually are:
(Photo also borrowed from the interwebs.)
Anyway, it was a sad day when we discovered this. We may or may not have wondered aloud why we can’t have nice things. And now we’re a little less likely to stay there. If I get a good rate, sure, but I won’t be as quick to seek it out.
Of course, I still ate these, because they’re free and I hate myself.
We drove down Rt. 1 a bit and then got off at the exit for the
17-Mile Drive.
The 17-Mile Drive is a scenic road that takes you around the entire Monterey Peninsula. The appeal lies in the stretch that hugs the coastline along Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean, weaving through both high-end resorts and the homes of the ultra-rich. And, in a total “rich dirtbag” move, it costs $10.50 to drive it. Gotta keep the riffraff out, you know. You can get that fee back if you patronize the lodge, or the restaurants, etc. Gosh, now I sound like one of them. Excuse me while I go take a shower.
Anyway, we held our noses and paid the fee because we (ok, the boys and I) wanted to see the golf courses. The Monterey Peninsula is considered to be one of the finest stretches of golf real estate in the world—the linksland of Scotland and the sand belt of Australia would be the other locales that could make the same claim. The jewel in the Monterey crown is the Pebble Beach Golf Links, which even most non-golfers have heard of and happens to be
hosting a very important tournament this weekend.
We got past the gate and started our drive with a climb into the hills. And for the first few miles of our precious 17, we got to see…trees. And a few houses. Some fences. Totally worth $10.50.
Everyone was getting bored, so I drove though the curves and switchbacks as quickly as I could. We saw a couple of houses on the hillside that looked impressive, and then we made our way down the hill and over to the coastline. This is where the drive really begins, in my opinion. There’s even a gateway (the Pacific Grove Gate) to 17-Mile Drive near this spot where you can enter and skip the boring part of the drive.
We drove past the Links at Spanish Bay golf course and finally caught our first glimpse of Monterey Bay. There was a parking area and a public beach where a few people were out for a morning stroll, walking their dogs. The coast is inherently more interesting than trees.
In the part of the water where the currents of the bay met the currents of the ocean, we could see two sets of waves breaking toward each other. Kind a neat phenomenon. Hard to capture in a photo, though.
Looking back into the sun gave us some interesting light through the mist and cypress trees. It was a beautiful spot.
Now, I know that most of you are not avid golfers. I’ve probably already caused some of you to start nodding off just by mentioning the word “golf”. And those of you who even mildly enjoy the game probably do not share my interest in the intricacies of golf course architecture. So I will work to try and make this interesting without getting too much into the weeds. In fact, I’ll try and highlight the more golf-heavy paragraphs in
GOLF NERD GREEN so you can easily skip them if you so choose. And in the meantime, there will be pretty pictures!
Right next to our little viewpoint was a par 3, part of the Dunes Course at the
Monterey Peninsula Country Club. It’s a dream of every golfer to play a course that requires a shot over rocky cliffs or the ocean, and this made me wish I had my clubs in the car.
Of course, that club is intensely private and not for schlubs on a government salary like me, so this is as close as I’d get. You could almost hear the club members standing nearby, guarding their property from the likes of us and shouting “Mine! Mine! Mine!”
There’s a second course at the Monterey Peninsula C.C., the Shore Course. It used to be a boring course and kind of a waste of the prime ocean real estate. In 2003, it was redesigned and re-built from the ground up by architect Mike Strantz, who sadly passed away from cancer shortly after it was opened. Strantz is one of my favorites, an artist who wasn’t afraid to do things a little differently. Many of his courses look nothing like anyone else’s. MPCC might actually be one of his most conventional designs. It opened to rave reviews and has been part of a PGA tournament for the last few years. Sadly, Strantz only built 9 courses before he was taken too soon at the age of 50.
For my father’s 70th birthday last year, I took him to play a Strantz course in North Carolina that had been on our bucket list because it was so wild and different—I might save that one for a bonus chapter within the bonus chapters here, like Inception.
From a side road which I’m not sure I was allowed to be on, I was able to see a couple of different holes on the Shore Course. It really looked gorgeous.
I snapped those photos quickly and jogged back to the van after being passed by a guy in a BMW giving me the stinkeye.
See that large rock in the background of that last photo, out in the water? An overlook near there was our next stop. That large rock is known as Bird Rock, probably because of the incredibly large number of seals that were hanging out on it.
Actually, it got its name because birds like to rest there, too. The map said they once scraped off a layer of bird crap to be recycled as fertilizer that was several inches thick. Someone should get in touch with San Francisco.
There’s also a rock called Seal Rock nearby, but no seals were resting there. Instead, they were muscling in on the birds’ territory. They’re probably jerks.
They were also LOUD. Constant barking could be heard across the water. We got a big kick out of it, to be honest. I think this was the first time my kids had ever seen seals in the wild.
For her part, Julie remarked to me that she had just expected to be bored in the car and indulging me while I gawked at golf courses, but between the coast, the views, and the seals, she was actually really enjoying the drive.
I wanted to know how some of those seals had managed to climb all the way to the top of the rock.
We made a pit stop at a bathroom building nearby, which was obviously the domain of lower-class hooligans like ourselves.
Onward we drove, toward Cypress Point. We passed the Spyglass Hill golf course, which is also part of the annual PGA tournament played in this area.
The Cypress Point Club is located right on the Northwest corner of the peninsula, and is the most private of any of the clubs in the area. You don’t ask to join that club, they ask you. Oddly, I’ve never been asked. It’s also considered one of the greatest golf courses in the world—some rate it even better than Pebble Beach. It was designed by Alister Mackenzie, who also built a little course called Augusta National.
You can see several holes from the road, but the best and most famous holes (the 15th and 16th) are hidden by a rocky slope and trees. So I could only catch a quick glimpse of the 15th tee through the trees. Check out the photos here if you want to see what only a few golfers get to try in real life—hitting shots across the ocean.
Hugging the Pacific coast, we were now in Stupid Money territory. I didn’t get any good photos due to the fact that we were moving on a narrow road and would have had to shoot through trees, but the houses along this stretch looked like castles. I mean literal castles. Walt Disney would have been proud of some of those structures. We reached another overlook for the Lone Cypress, which Pebble Beach has adopted as their symbol/logo. With the ocean as a backdrop, it does make for a pretty great view. I bet it looks amazing at sunset.
We made one more turn and then found the parking lot next to the
Lodge at Pebble Beach. They actually had a visitor center nearby with a few displays anticipating the upcoming U.S. Open tournament.
Pebble Beach is considered one of the finest golf courses in the world. It’s hosted numerous major championships, including the U.S. Open several times, which is often considered the most difficult tournament to win in the world. It’s always played on the toughest courses in the toughest conditions—thick rough, narrow fairways, lightning-fast greens. Winning is often a matter of survival more than triumph.
The course is most famous for several holes that run along the coast, daring the golfer to pull off heroic shots over beaches and rocky cliffs. If there’s a criticism of the course, it’s that the inland holes don’t compare to the Oceanside ones…but then again, how could they? Most golfers dream of playing a round at Pebble Beach, where they can try the same shots that tested the all-time greats like Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, or Tiger Woods. And the good news is, they can! It’s a public course.
The bad news: it costs $550 to play a round of 18 holes. Oh, and if you want a guaranteed tee time, you have to stay at one of their hotels, where rooms start around $650 a night.
So, I will probably never play golf here. But I could at least take a look.
In the visitor center, we got to take turns posing with the U.S. Open trophy. Dave decided to try out the ChunkyDump pose.
Scotty preferred trying out the local transportation.
And then we wandered around the lodge itself. I was able to walk into the pro shop and successfully kept from bursting out laughing when someone asked me if I was playing later, while I was standing there in my ACME hat and hiking pants. But I did pick up a ball cap to make it look like I’d played there.
I could watch golfers tee off at the 1st hole:
And we could walk out the back of the lodge and see the famous, iconic 18th hole. This is a par 5 that runs along the rocky coastline for its entire length. A lot of history has been made on this hole. It was a neat experience to see it for myself.
Finally, after a morning spent in the company of the rich and famous, in the shadows of their castles, looking out over their playgrounds, we settled down into our minivan and ate our peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
Coming Up Next: Julie and Sarah get more excited about this trip as we start adding national parks to the itinerary.