My Bandon Trip - December 31, 2002
You might find this amusing.
I had been to Bandon one time before, playing BD. I absolutely fell in love with this place to the point I really don't want to spend any travel money to play anywhere else -- Playing a type of golf course I had never experienced before. During this time, I became a frequent lurker on this website buying recommended golf architecture books, learning as much as I could. PD had recently opened up. I needed another fix and was primed for another trip to Oregon.
I spent Christmas with my family and parents in Longmont Colo. On December 29th, I left Longmont and traveled to Rock Springs, WY (home) to reload the car that night for a trip to Bandon. We got up the next morning and left at 4 AM with one wife, 3 kids and one dog in a Chevy Caprice. We traveled through Utah, slightly past Boise and headed across the middle of Oregon. Hit Bend Oregon as nightfall hit. Decided to continue onto Roseburg Oregon. During the entire trip, we found out the dog (Sheltie) did not ride in the car well. He was literally doing laps in the car going from one persons lap to another and sometimes pausing to sit in the back window.
Leaving Bend, we traveled over the mountains skirting the north entrance of Crater Lake. Having grown up in Colorado, I had never seen the amount of snow piled up in those Oregon mountains. At some point, we had to pass one of those snow removal trucks that was shooting snow way over the high snow banks on both sides of the road. We arrived in Roseburg about 10 PM.
It was raining hard when we arrived, it wasn't letting up the next morning and the forecast wasn't good. I quickly found a pro shop in Roseburg that had rain gloves for my son and I. The pro told me that Bandon alternated courses in the winter. I had only two days available to golf and I subsequently found out that PD was only open that very day. I didn't want to travel that far without playing PD. The pro called Bandon for me and found out that it was raining hard on the coast. It was about 10 AM when I left Roseburg.
I traveled the next 80 miles going as fast as I could go so that I could get 18 holes in. When I arrived at the course at 11:30. It was raining but it didn't seem too bad at the clubhouse. There were 60 people on the course when I got there. We paid and teed off within 20 minutes of arriving. The girls headed toward town and I told them to come back in about 4.5 hours.
The rain was tolerable for the first two holes. Considering the conditions, I was thrilled to par the first two holes. By the time we got to the green on PD#3 right on the ocean, the rain was horizontal, with the wind 35 - 50 mph (guess) -- double bogey #3. The wind was right in our face heading down the coast on PD#4. It was an incredible struggle all the way to finish the hole. My college aged son was playing with me. He can take or leave golf, but was willing to play with me. We got to PD#5, about 160 yds. My son hit a 3 wd very well off the tee and was approximately 25 yards short of the green.
By the time we arrived at #7 or #8, I had to find the restroom . As I came out, my son was standing there shivering quite bad. Up to that point, I was so excited about playing this great golf course, I didn't care about the conditions and was oblivious to what my son was going through. I could have called crawled into a hole as I stood there looking at him. With tremendous guilt, I asked him if he wanted to head back to the clubhouse. He said no he would go on.
We finished through #8 and came off the green with the wind absolutely howling and the horizontal rain just beating us up. We initially could not find the PD#9 tee box which we finally found behind the trees behind the #8 green. Standing on #9 tee box, we saw the bunker on the dune ahead of us but was not sure where the fairway was. Finally deciding the fairway was on top of the dune, I wasn't sure I had enough in me to reach the fairway hitting into this wind. I got the drive on top. When we climbed to the fairway, the wind was blowing so hard I did not think I could swing and maintain my balance enough to hit the ball. My son and I huddled together in the fairway waiting for a dropoff in the wind. After 5 minutes of waiting, I decided to go ahead and hit. We finished #9 and #10. At that point, I could tell my son was done. He was willing to watch me but I decided to pack in it for his sake.
I wear glasses and had to walk back to the clubhouse with my head down and could not keep a hat on my head. It was raining so hard that it was hurting my forehead. We got back to the clubhouse approx 2.5 hours after we started. The head pro, Jim Wakeman, had towels ready for us when we arrived. The windows in the clubhouse were visibly shaking. Despite our rain gear, we were soaked down to our underwear. Fortunately, my wife arrived almost immediately after we hit the clubhouse with fresh clothes. I asked her why she had showed up early. She told me that when she started to see snow flakes in Bandon that she had a feeling we wouldn't be finishing.
Jim Wakeman was great to us and felt so sorry that I had driven so far to find these conditions that he sent me an opening day scorecard from Pacific Dunes signed by Mike Keiser and Tom Doak.
As a final ending to this trip, I returned to Bandon two months later in February with three other golf buddies and played in great weather. The assistant at Pacific Dunes took a look at me in the clubhouse and said "You look familiar to me". I told him I was from Wyoming and had recently been there. At that point, he recognized me and said "You are that guy in that white car that came out here with your wife, a dog and all those kids and played in that nasty weather". I got some good looks from the golf buddies. If I want to tease my kids, I tell them we are taking our family vacation to Bandon. I think they will kill me if I am serious.