The Golf Trip

The golf trip is one of the oldest fixtures in American travel, and it has never really been about the golf. It is about the same four people in the same rented house every year, the standing tee time, the dinner afterward where the round is replayed shot by shot, and the town around the course that has learned, over generations, exactly how to receive them. The courses anchor the tradition. The places keep it.

The good golf towns share a temperament. They take the game seriously without taking themselves seriously, they feed people well at the end of a long day outside, and they offer enough for the rest of the household that the trip survives the years when half the party stops playing. The regulars judge a golf destination by its evenings as much as its fairways, and they are right to.

This edition covers the range of the tradition. It goes to Augusta, a river city that the world visits for one week in April and mostly forgets the other fifty-one, to the stadium course at Ponte Vedra Beach and the seaside golf of the Golden Isles, to the Pennsylvania mountains where a resort in the Laurel Highlands does nothing halfway, to a winery with fairways an hour north of Atlanta, and to the Texas prairie where the game's American headquarters has lately put down roots.

Book the tee times when you book the rooms, since the good ones move together, and build the trip around one serious round a day rather than two. The game is the excuse. The trip is the point, and it always has been.