Just some random thoughts after my first 36 at Meadow Club last week.
The greens are really large. Maybe the biggest I've seen on a classic-style course. Not many chip shots, even in 36 holes. And between the size, the surrounding hills, the "flat" meadow, etc., they're very tough to read. A lot of local knowledge involved, too.
The yardage on #7 (466) is wrong. I tried several different routes on Google Earth and 435 is a more realistic number. I knew I didn't hit driver, 9-iron 466!
The setting is really neat. And yes, it's hard to imagine how Mackenzie and company even got there. It's a couple of miles from the nearest anything.
Whoever said #9 was wide - WTF? That's the toughest drive on the course! Left and you're in a deep bunker 200 yards from the green; right and you're in rough or sand behind 80-foot-tall trees.
The 16th was probably my favorite hole, because it turns a lot of the conventions for short par-4's upside down - it has a huge green, and the hole gets wider as you get closer to the green. The subtle downslope in the fairway makes the wedge shot more challenging than one would suspect at first.
It's a bummer that, probably for safety reasons, so many holes still have out-of-character lines of dense trees. You can see some in the pictures above. In particular, 6 and 13 are sort of a shock to the system, but 2, 3, 9, and 17 are also affected significantly.
It's a different kind of place than Cal Club. Cal Club blows you away a bunch of times, where you stand on a tee and go "wow". I don't think you get that as much at Meadow Club, because the feeling is smaller and more intimate. You get it on 7, maybe, and probably 13, but otherwise I think you proceed through the round in more of a sense of comfortable appreciation - different than Cal Club, but a very, very nice feeling to have.