The Home of Golf: St. Andrews (New Brunswick, Canada)
A trip on a whim is better than no trip at all.
I landed in Portland, Maine at 10:30 on a Friday night, and drove the hour and a half home. I was exhausted, but I was golfing the next day, in Canada, so all was good.
@GLENBURNZ rapped on my door. It was 8am.
“We screwed up the time change, gotta leave earlier than we thought.”
Screwed up the time change? I asked myself. Shit. Yeah, I did.
Earlier that week I spoke with a fine gentleman on the phone. He was in the golf shop at The Algonquin Golf Course in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. I was in my hotel room in downtown Denver, Colorado. I booked two tee times. One on Saturday afternoon, the other on Sunday morning.
“Alrighty then, we’ll see you at 2pm on Saturday. You know about the time change right?” the kind fellow with an ambiguous British Isles accent questioned.
“No, I don’t” I said.
“We’re an hour ahead of Maine. Good for you to know.”
“Yes, that’s great to know. Thank you sir. See you on Saturday!”
I did the math in my head. I’m in Denver, and Maine is two hours ahead, tack one more onto that. Easy money. We get an extra hour on the ride home Sunday. That was as far as my time calculus got.
I did all this math again as I dusted out my eyelids. Shit. It’s 9am in New Brunswick. It’s a 4 hour drive, our tee time is at 2. “Glen, we gotta go now!”
We were zooming in the car by 8:15. It was a beautiful drive thanks to the #foliage. We meandered through the usual stretch of roads one would take on the way down east. We slid across the Penobscot Narrows bridge that connects the town of Prospect and Verona Island. The bridge happens to be the site of the tallest public bridge observatory in the world. Yeah, the world. Look it up.
We saw the witches foot on the tombstone in Bucksport and soon enough we were at the Canadian border crossing in Calais. One little tollbooth manned by an easygoing Canuck stood in our way to Canada. He let us through with a glazed look at our passports and soon we were cruising down a highway with speed warnings in kilometers barking at us as we passed. It was a much shorter trip in Canada down the peninsula to St. Andrews, only 30 minutes. The coastline began to open up, time jumped an hour, and soon we were at the entrance to Algonquin Golf Course. It was only 1 pm! Plenty of time to do whatever the hell we needed to do.
A nice woman helped us with our bags at the drop, and she even drove our cart over to us while we got organized in the parking lot. Such service! The clubhouse was unassuming, but classy and clean with a big restaurant and patio that overlooked the 18th green. We checked in at the shop, grabbed a couple sandwiches on rye bread made with roast beef (or maybe it was ham, the color was ambiguous), and a few Moosehead Pale Ales to wash it down. Once those were gobbled we headed to the range to warm up. A robot (unmanned) ball picker was working hard in front of us. No, I didn’t try to hit it. I was just amazed this kind of technology had made it up to Canada. (cheap joke, sorry Canada.) I couldn’t help but wonder whose job the robot had taken. A man was sitting in a golf cart on the side of the range, waiting, I guess. At one point the robot came over to him, and seemed to unload all of the balls it had collected, then the guy sent it back out for more time in the field. I guess this robot didn’t steal a job, only made the human aspect more leisurely.
It was time to tee off. Hugh, the starter was a sight for sore eyes. He had a Bob Newhart vibe to him (the actor who played Elf’s adopted dad in the North Pole, not James Caan). Hugh gently told us about the course and what to expect when we got out there.
“Just wait for the back nine, I hope you didn’t forget your cameras,” Hugh said.
“We didn’t.” And I genuinely wondered if Hugh knew that smart phones have cameras on them. I’m a jackass.
The first hole was very friendly. A wide fairway opened up over the hill and we both were in play and on the green in two. But, it took both of us three putts to find the cup. A common theme for the weekend that made itself known early. The greens were slippery.
The front nine was one of the best I played all year. Not the way I played them, but the best I saw. The fescue is nice on the eyes, although not on the clubhead and there were well placed bunkers that borrowed our balls on occasion. There was a good mix of holes, par 3’s, 4’s, 5’s all waiting for us to three putt. It was slow going with groups ahead, but it really gave us a chance to settle into the round and a little vacation farther north. We saw a lot of deer, they were so close and unabashed I almost pet one like Will Ferrell and the racoon in Elf. Okay, that’s enough Elf references. We later found out that deer were rampant in this area, somebody had to put a stop to these horny hoofed beasts! In any event, the sun was out, temps were in the 60’s (fahrenheit), and Moosehead is a fine beer. I was feeling tingly as we made the turn.
The 10th hole is a lengthy par 3 that gave us our first real peek at the ocean. Well, it’s really Passamaquoddy Bay, but you get the idea. St. Andrews pokes its way out into the bay and on its West side is the mouth of the St. Croix River, a river that serves as a convenient border between Maine and Canada. The first peek at the ocean is directly ahead of you as you look out from the 10th tee.
Making the turn at Algonquin Golf Course
From the 10th green we made a hard right, back into the land and away from the sea, or so it seemed. The 11th is a beefy par 5. The tee shot goes up, and the approaches go down. But how far down? We didn’t know. I hit a feeble drive while Glen bombed his into oblivion. I hit a hooky 3 hybrid on a dangerously left line, while Glen waited to see where his drive had ended up over the crest. We waited for the group in front of us to clear the green, but then they started driving back at us. Were they skipping holes? Did my shitty 3 hybrid hit one of them in the back? Did they just get a call from the Canadian lottery and had to go claim their winnings? Did the Maple Leafs trade Auston Matthews? We didn’t know and they didn’t tell us as they drove by.
I hit the best shot I could’ve from the left rough, and I scampered over the hill to watch it trundle, but I didn’t see much. The 11th green is a masterful site. It is seriously down hill from the crown of the fairway, at least 30 ft, and I’m not sure how many meters. Just look at this view as Glen hit his approach:
Nice fist pump, Glen.
The green was a danger zone. It ran off steeply into bunkers and a waste area to the back. Glen’s shot might have looked pretty in that video, but we both failed to find our balls. We quickly dropped at our best guess and and distractedly finished the hole due to the views of beyond.
I have never taken more pictures on a golf course. I’m usually pretty camera shy. Too concerned with pace of play, the way I’m playing, or it’s just that the course isn’t worthy of my camera roll. But I had an extremely happy trigger finger on this back nine.
The 12th hole should be world famous, and my pictures won’t do it justice.
You can see the flag down there, right?
“This is just like Pebble Beach!” I said.
“You’ve been there?” Glen said.
“Look at this shit!” I said, ignoring Glen’s layup response.
Little bit of an ugly swing there, pop fly to shallow right field. I came up short, but the ball was in play and I got up and down in 2. It didn’t matter. Look at this shit! What a spot to be on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And we were playing golf?! For less than 100 American dollars?!
Glen drained a bomb of a par putt and I never wanted to leave this green. But the nim rods behind us were patiently waiting their turn. Oh well. What’s this course got next?
13th tee box
The 13th was a truly blind hole. There were vague promises of a fairway up there somewhere, so we both hit. My drive went dangerously right. The walk over this dune into the fairway brought the remaining holes into view. But we tried not to look ahead too much.
The view from the fairway revealed a duned cliff, onto a rocky beach. My ball must have gone down there. I scrambled down the steep bank and searched for my little white ball that looked a lot like little white rocks and other low tide treasures. Glen assured me he saw one, and I tracked it down, but it wasn’t mine. Some sorry sack of goo didn’t have the sense of adventure I did. I decided to play the ball anyways. I perched it up on a little sand tee and aimed for the bushes. Sound up below…
If you’re a golf nut like me, you probably have spent time hitting balls off of untraditional surfaces and locations. Chipping on a rug, hacking around on an overgrown athletic field, finding weird ground like mulch, pebbles, mud, or real beach sand just to see what it’s like to hit out of. But, how often do you get to actually feel like you’re just out there chopping it up with the maritime birds and fish and then you get to hit a golf ball towards an actual green with a flag? Turns out it’s something I get pretty excited about.
I was playing a match with Glen. Nothing serious, maybe dinner was on the line. But when I saw a golf ball that didn’t turn out to be mine on a rocky beach 30ft below the fairway, I went at it like water going down a drain.
I could pontificate further with words extracted from a thesaurus, but it was just fun.
The next hour of our lives stood still as we meandered along the homeward holes. I’ll describe that next hour that Glen and I had with words, then I’ll drop the pictures at the end for your viewing pleasure.
Holes 13-17 play back and forth like a zipper. On the 13th green, the 14th green is on your left. On the 14th green, the 15th tee is on your right, and so it goes. I didn’t realize this until the 16th tee, but it was as nice of a walk I’ve ever had. The course wasn’t jammed into the land, it fit. The ocean was always in view and we were just taking a little walk from the sea back to our car. The holes were stairs, and we were taking our time getting up them like an old timer saying, “I’m too old for this shit”, when actually we were saying something like, “I never want to be too old for this shit.”
The 13th green was stunning. Maybe even better views than the 11th and 12th. It sat up on the plateau of the ridge and we could see the little town we would call home that night. From my ball position left of the green, it looked like the green fell off the cliff right behind the flag, and it essentially did.
There were sparse but big beautiful maple trees and one especially lonesome tree that really got my attention. You’ll see in the pictures, but it wasn’t quite peak sunset (golden hour). But it was warm, and on October 19th in Canada, nobody was complaining.
The only thing that brought me out of my stupor for a moment was an obnoxiously loud speaker a few holes away. These guys had the awareness of first time boat owners getting ready to chug out of the marina. The music was so loud. Not to be a doink, but it was so loud.
The 17th bounded back towards the clubhouse and led to the 18th green where we turned directly back up the hill to the clubhouse. The 18th was a short and straightforward hole, a friendly finisher for me as I wondered what hole I lost the match on.
We finished our round and got out of there pretty quickly. We were hungry and wanted to get things moving at the hotel down the road. We had a room at the Kennedy House, which turned out to be a gem after cursory yet effective research a few days prior. It was an old Inn, maybe the first in St. Andrews if I remember correctly. Our room came with a real metal key and we were able to park the car on the street outside the front door.
We needed food. A few places were jammed to the gills or closed and we finally landed on a place I won’t name here. It was a bad spot, and I’m usually pretty gracious with restaurants. Too modern to fit in with the town and souless like a strip mall Subway sandwich. But our desperation led us to the bar. The bartender was riding solo making drinks, and he was pissed about it. We felt for the guy but it also was not that crowded. On that note, we did soon find out that this was one of the busiest weekends of the year in the tiny town of St. Andrews. A festival called “Indulge” was popping off. Like us, you wouldn’t have known it until somebody told you, and then it sort of made sense. The bartender might have poisoned Glen, as he didn’t finish his cheeseburger, a sign of acute illness.
We spent the rest of the night wandering from a brewery, to the bar in the lobby of our hotel where we watched many folks dance in drunken abandon, then to a live concert in a tent where an 80’s cover band was tearing it up, and finally to a bar called The Herring. We met a lot of nice people at The Herring, including a local chef that resembled Jack Sparrow so directly I had to convince him of such. The bartender treated us well, and Glen and I both fell in love with her. We got to bed at an unreasonable hour, but we were there for “Indulge”, so it was worth it.
The next morning we woke up feeling crusty and slightly confused. Was it the time change or the Moosehead Lager? We hastily packed our stuff and zoomed to Tim Horton’s.
We got to the clubhouse and found out we were paired with two other golfers, members of the club. Especially in our foggy state, this was not good news. But I have never had a really bad random pairing, unlike instagram would make you believe with all those fake videos about getting paired with a lunatic when in reality the person filming is pals with the lunatic in the video. #fakenews
On the first tee we met out playing partners, a delightful Canadian couple who had retired in St. Andrews. We enjoyed a serene round together and these folks could not have been more courteous, encouraging of our games, and generally enthusiastic about their course and town. The ocean holes filled our souls once again and the walk up the back nine staircase only looked a little worse in the light of the morning than the afternoon.
As any good high school english essay would say, in conclusion: For public golf in the northeast (including eastern provinces of Canada) I don’t think you will find an equally stunning, playable, affordable, quaint, humble, and memorable spot than Algonquin Golf Course in St. Andrew’s, New Brunswick. I thank the good people who built and maintain that course and I hope to bring many folks up there, whether I can join them or not.
*Writer’s note: I know the title of this piece is a little tongue in cheek, but there was more reason than the obvious for titling it in that way. Today is December 3rd. I just got back from a trip in Scotland, and yes, we did go to the actual home of golf. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.*
Oh yeah, photos:
My ball, left of the 13th green
The Lonely Tree and the 14th green
The staircase of holes
Fading light on the 16th green
The Kennedy House
Jack Sparrow and I
Stay Curious.
