Jason Topp and I had a memorable New Year's Day - for the wrong reasons.
Personally, I blame it on Ran
- but lets start at the beginning.
Newcastle Golf Club - 180km north of Sydney - has been popularised on this site at least in part due to Ran's enthusiasm for this course (and he is in good company - it ranks 12th or so in the strong list of good Australian courses).
In the way of GCA, Jason (Minneapolis) and I (London) - two cyber-buddies who had not previously met - discovered we were both holidaying in Australia over Xmas/New Year, and overlapped in Sydney. So we made a plan to play at Newcastle at 10am on New Year's Day. The concierge's instructions were deficient, so a 2 hour trip became 3 hours, a 10am start became 11am, and things went downhill from there.
We should have smelt a rat when the car-park had only two other cars in it on a fine day, even if it was New Year's Day. The issue, of course, was the heat. That day, as we later discovered, the mercury touched 44.5 in Sydney - the hottest day since who knows when. Foolishly, we set off, walking as good GCAers do.
Very quickly my only thought on hitting a tee shot was where to find the shade as I walked to my ball. When you stood over your ball, you could find the heat radiating up from the ground. When you went onto the sandy patches, it was worse.
By the 7th hole, I had my first cold flush. That set alarm bells ringing - heat stroke etc. So as we were finishing the 9th (and we had scampered around in 95 min) I said to Jason - despite all our effort to get to this course - that I though we should call it a day before we did serious damage to ourselves. I like to think that I am quite a hardy sort on the golf course, but this was going too far. And even Jason, who knows a bit of Arizona golf, was prepared to agree that this was serious stuff.
Fortunately he was of a like mind so we headed for the clubhouse, licked our wounds and then later quickly went round the second nine in a buggy.
But that was not the end of it. So extreme was the weather that as we headed back to Sydney, we discovered that the two - and only - access roads into Sydney from the north had been closed because of bushfires. We had two choices: sit it out till they reopened (one hour? three hours? twelve hours?) or take the only alternative route ( a circuitous 3-4 hour trip we were told - even though we were now only 40 minutes from Sydney).
The atmosphere was panicky given the heat - long queues, petrol selling out, water selling out - so we went for the option of keeping moving, believing we would be home 3-4 hours later.
The good bit of the drive was that it took us through some fabulous countryside - the wine-growing areas of the Hunter Valley, past the big racing studs like Coolmore etc, which we would not otherwise have done.
The bad news was that this route, allowing for a navigational error which cost us about 120 km, ended up with us getting home at 12 midnight, with 880km on the clock, after 9 hours or so on the road (the round trip should have been 360km).
For two guys who had only met each other that morning - it was quite a day! I have still to discover whether Mrs Topp had any sympathy for the ordeal her husband endured - or was looking after two children in that heat even worse?
I have previously been blown off the course at Brora and rained off the course at Brora. Now I can proudly say that I have also been scorched off the course at Newcastle.
