CordeValle Championship Golf Resort Adventure

The thing I love about living in California, and there are many, is that you can drive a short distance and find yourself in a different world.

As most of you know, I live in Los Gatos. I’m two hours from Napa Valley, an hour from the quaint, seaside town of Carmel, and I most recently discovered, 30 minutes from one of the most beautiful golf courses – The CordeValle Championship Golf Resort.

If you joined me when we visited the AT&T Pebble Beach PRO-AM you know I have held a golf club before. Granted, the ones I have look like they are made of bronze. They have titanium shafts which I’m sure have been obsolete for years.

My driver head is about 1/16 the size of the ones they sell today. And Arnold Schwarzenegger could have weight trained with my bag – apparently it’s that heavy. But even so, someone was brave enough to take me with them to play on the CordeValle Championship Golf Resort last Friday, knowing I had not swung a club in almost 15 years.

I will admit I was a little nervous. I have hit a few scary balls in my time, so the ones who should have been nervous really should have been the other three in this foursome. I mean, how can you hit a ball that shoots out directly in front of you. No, not to your left, out toward the green but directly in front of where you are standing. Or, I’ve even heard of someone who hit a ball and it shot out behind them. Even with these life threatening occurrences, people still grab their clubs and head off to hit a round. I’m surprised they don’t make you wear a helmet if you’re playing with someone who has not broken a 100.

As I smacked away at the ball I kept thinking, thank God I’m not driving because I truly had no idea where we were going. I mean, I knew where the green was, but the cart path seemed to wind around in a multitude of directions once you picked your ball off the green.

At one point, we let other players through – although I picked up my ball many times to keep the game moving, I’m sure I still did slow things down a bit. But when you have lemons, what do you do? You make lemonade. In our case, we drove this little lemon over to the Clos La Chance Winery, got her a bottle of Pinot (I did share), and headed back over to play the rest of the course.

So you may be wondering, how did I play? Well, with the help of some very good instructions from the “hummer,” I did play 18 holes, sort of, and I actually pared one.

So I’ll leave you with my sunset photo. We played later in the afternoon so when we got to the last holes we saw a gorgeous sunset … all in all, it was pretty spectacular day… . A special thanks to my very brave hummer for taking me along for the ride.

Here’s a link to a hole-by-hole tour which is a pretty cool site: http://www.cordevallegolf.com/golf/course/hole-by-hole-course-tour

To read about more adventures written by Shelley D. Spray please visit her blog at www.photogirltravels.com