The British Open: The Old Course at St. Andrews

I woke up excited like a little child ready to go meet Minnie (not Mickey) for the first time at DisneyWorld because I knew I was a few hours from stepping foot on the Old Course at St. Andrews.  Seeing that golf was pretty much my life for 8 solid years I could not wait to walk the grounds of where golf started!

We decided to go on a Friday to make sure we could see Tiger in case he missed the cut and we would be able to see a lot of golf during the day.  The first tee time was 7:30 AM and the last people teed off around 4PM so we knew it was going to be a long day.  We still had an hour plus drive to the tourney so we left our hotel around 7:30 and headed on our first real trip on the other side of the road and of course it was raining.  There were lots of signs pointing to the tourney and we were parked around 9AM and ready to enter.  Although the most interesting sign we saw on the way stated: "Traffic signals in operation to protect weak bridge."  So, instead of fixing the bridge they just put in a traffic light to ensure only one-way traffic will be on the bridge at one time!

We decided not to try and smuggle in our cameras or phones and overall were completely unprepared after leaving the car –- the shuttle that took us from the parking lot to the entrance was right next to us when we arrived so we were very rushed and forgot pretty much everything we wanted except the tickets: hat, gloves, dry socks, extra coat , etc.  It was pouring before we even got inside to a food stand and of course the memorabilia tents were complete out of umbrellas already first thing in the morning on Friday – so stupid.  Luckily, after two big rain storms the rain stopped for the rest of the day and we were glad we didn’t leave to go buy an umbrella at one of the stores in the town, but were still wishing we had our hats (Nicholas) and gloves (me).  We were amazed how close the holes were to each other, including the multiple greens which have 2 holes on them.   But, it made it easy to get around the course and could watch quite a bit of golf without moving much – if of course you could get to a spot early enough.  In the middle of the afternoon we were walking back to the corner of holes 7,8,9,10,11, and 12 and we heard the horn blow to stop play.  They stopped play because it was so windy on the 11th green that the ball would not stop.  We headed back there to watch 4 people drops and roll golf balls around the green for over an hour, the wind didn’t die down one bit, (this is the point where Nicholas wished he had a Sherpa hoodie because I was nice and warm with 2 hoods and he didn’t have one, so I switched coats with him so we would both have a hood…!) and then they started play again.. and everyone played the slowest golf ever.  We saw Tiger play a couple great holes then not be able to make a single putt for the last 3 hours we watched him.  We left when he finished 15 and it was already after 9PM so we knew they would call it soon.  This meant that we wouldn’t be getting into Inverness until after midnight but overall it was a great day of average golf in terrible weather conditions but the course, the setting with the town and the sea, and the history summed up to a great experience.

Captions: Top - Entrance
Bottom - St. Andrews town in the background from where we parked