Ultimate Guide 2023 – Syndication Server

Golf travel: Bounding across Scotland, from Royal Dornoch around to St. Andrews with stops all along the way

From the Scottish Highlands around to St. Andrews, a series of true links astonish with variety, playability and charm.

Where to begin?

That is not a rhetorical question. When laying out a bucket-list golf trip to Scotland, it’s a very serious query, part of a series of such questions that will follow you around the country. Where to begin? Which course next? Toughest of all: Which courses can I bear to skip?

Headed to St. Andrews? There’s a lot more on tap than the famed Old Course, 30 times the site of the British Open – ahem, Open Championship, thank you very much. Will you play the New Course, which seems a misnomer, seeing how it was built by Old Tom Morris in 1895? How about the Jubilee? The Castle, which having opened outside town in 2008 is the newest of the seven courses managed by the St. Andrews Links Trust? Maybe sample a handful of the other layouts not far from the Home of Golf?

Headed into the Highlands for a dream round at Royal Dornoch? Everyone on other courses, on the way and on social media will tell you that you can’t skip nearby Brora (I didn’t) or Tain or Golspie (I missed both, but I already am planning to return). Scouting a classic links trip to Aberdeen? You can’t miss classic links such as Royal Aberdeen, or Murcar Links or Cruden Bay or a handful of others. The options are lined up along the coast. All the coasts of Scotland, actually.

Cabot Highlands, formerly known as Castle Stuart, in Scotland (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

Headed east? You’ll be told not to miss the courses to the west. Looking north? Don’t miss those gems to the south. Whichever point of the compass you choose and whatever address you plug into Google Maps, there will be dozens of opportunity costs – all those suggestions are correct, even if they create a totally unmanageable itinerary for a traveling golfer on a weeklong holiday.

Weeks after my recent trip, when playing with a group of Golfweek’s Best course raters in California, I barely could finish a sentence about where I played before the questions poured in: Did you play this one, and what about that one? We all process the world through the lenses of our own experiences, and that’s especially true when judging the courses somebody else is, or is not, playing.

Such was the quandary when I started planning this trip to Scotland. I was lucky, because I knew where I would begin. American course designer Tom Doak is building a new course at Castle Stuart near Inverness, which is being rebranded as Cabot Highlands after its recent acquisition by Canadian company Cabot. I would begin there to hear Doak discuss his plans as well as to sample the original course at the resort.

But from there? I had options. Too many options. The names of famous Scottish links courses roll on and on, and it would take months to see even half of what I had in mind. I had only 12 days on the ground, so I enlisted the help of course booking provider Golfbreaks and the local experts at VisitScotland.com to help set up a trip that would venture high into the Highlands before swinging back down the coast, east to Aberdeen and eventually into St. Andrews.

Scotland, of course, is where the game as we know it was invented, and the best of it is all about links golf in particular. Firm, fast and sometimes almost entirely natural – I coveted the links experience. Of the 550 or so total golf courses in Scotland, fewer than 90 might be classified as true links, depending on one’s given definition – there is great debate among academics and clubhouse drunks about what constitutes a proper links. On this trip I was lucky enough to experience 11 examples. Each was distinctive, and don’t dare think of links golf as some uniform game, because it is the definitive opposite of that. The conditions might be similar, but each layout shines on its own, each bouncy shot promising something unexpected.

I played courses that are famed worldwide, and several that are less known outside Scotland. I played in sunshine and rain, wind and calm. I played well, and I played poorly. The only constants were the courses, the terrain and coastlines flashing through my exhausted head each night in whatever accommodations I had scheduled. The trip included planes, trains, buses, shuttles and a blue Skoda SUV – “Keep left, keep left, keep left,” I had to remind myself at the start of each drive on skinny, winding roads, because I couldn’t bear the thought of missing my next round of golf due to something so mundane as a car crash.

There were a lot of miles, a lot of different beds, a lot of nerves in the car. So many good courses, too many bad swings. And it was all perfect.

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Golf travel: A taste of Mexico at Punta Mita

The food, the drinks, the scene … oh yeah, the golf stands out at Punta Mita’s two courses, too.

Tania Ritchie and her husband were sailing around the world when friends of the Canadian couple asked to make a detour to view property.

Between mountains and the endless Pacific on a crescent of pristine beach is Punta Mita, a former fishing village on a private peninsula at the southernmost point of the Riviera Nayarit, 30 miles northwest of the resort city of Puerto Vallarta. A funny thing happened on their way around the world: The Ritchies ended up being the property buyers, calling off the sailing trip and never looking back.

“We were thinking we’d settle in Paris, maybe,” she says. “We had no intention of buying in Mexico, but we just knew and here we are 13 years later.”

Tania shared her origin story to this palm-shaded oasis of warm breezes, oceanfront holes and guaranteed good times between bites at a post-round feast last December at the 10th annual Golf & Gourmet, where I competed and hobnobbed along with golf greats Lorena Ochoa, Craig Stadler and Jean Van de Velde. It is the gated community’s signature and most anticipated event of the year, a four-day extravaganza of dining, drinking, teeing off and tastings. It is a modern-day bacchanalia with celebrity chefs, mixologists and sommeliers flown in for a weekend of culinary excellence, and it’s a bucket-list trip worth taking for golfers and non-golfers. (If anyone needs a partner, I’m available.)

Punta Mita’s Bahia Course, 17th hole, in Mexico (Courtesy of Punta Mita Golf Club)

I went solo because it was too soon for my wife and I both to be away from our then-10-month-old daughter. I promised my better half – not to mention the better golfer in the family – that one day I’d make it up to her. Never did I expect I’d deliver on the promise less than a year later, but that I did in October. The first time we were both away from our daughter – who we left in good hands with two of my sisters-in-law – felt like a belated babymoon.

A little more than 20 years ago, this southwest point on the Riviera Nayarit was nothing more than an off-the-grid spot for hardcore surfers. No one could have imagined that two championship golf courses, multimillion-dollar villas and two luxurious resorts, the Four Seasons and St. Regis, would be carved out of 1,500 acres of jungle on Banderas Bay.

On my first trip here, it didn’t take me long to discover why the Ritchies and tourists that enjoy activities such as snorkeling, scuba diving, sailing and fishing tend to fall hard for the intoxicating beauty of Punta Mita, especially at the Four Seasons Resort, where guests are welcomed at its thatched-roof – what the locals call a palapas – and open-air lounge and descend to a sparkling infinity pool at its center. Prepare to be blown away by views that register an 11 for “Wow” factor.

My accommodations were modern and elegant, and I opened the sliding glass door to draw in breezes off the electric-blue sea. But this is a place where you want to spend as little time in your room as possible.

I could’ve taken up permanent residence in the infinity pool, where the bartenders wade into the water to deliver drinks and snacks. I kept seeing sunbathers sipping straws out of coconuts, so I finally asked a middle-aged American tourist the name of this fanciful concoction. “Coco Loco,” he said of the mixture of gin, vodka, tequila and lime. “It’s kind of like a Long Island Iced Tea, but with tequila. You’ve got to have one … but only one!”

The St. Regis is every bit the equal of the Four Seasons for living in the lap of luxury, including a personal butler at your beck and call and a champagne toast for guests every Friday at sunset to ring in the weekend. There are two more five-star resorts scheduled to be built as part of a next phase in the development.

But when I visited with my wife, we stayed in a gorgeous rental property at the Tau Residences, which included our own terrace pool and a view of Bahia’s 17th green that could even be seen from the shower in the master bath. In effect the decision is to stay at one of the resorts and enjoy its amenities or choose from the many rental properties and receive access to the five beach clubs that dot the property and be treated as if you are the member-owner. It’s a bit like choosing between filet mignon and lobster tail for dinner. As someone who has done them both – the equivalent of surf and turf – I promise you can’t go wrong either way.

Golfweek’s Best 2023: Top 200 residential golf courses in the U.S.

Looking to live where you play? We have you covered with the top 200 residential golf courses in the U.S. for 2023.

Welcome to Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of top residential golf courses in the United States.

The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final, cumulative rating. Then each course is ranked against other courses in the region.

This list focuses on the golf courses themselves, not the communities as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s) and the year it opened.

* New to or returning to the list

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