Every summer my wife and I travel to Michigan at least once to ride bicycles for a weekend. Since 1980 we've been doing this with an outfit called Michigan Bicycle Touring. You can check them out at their website at www.bikembt.com. It's really just staying at a great Inn or Bed & Breakfast with fine dining Friday and Saturday evenings. Then you ride a great Cannondale bike a few miles on Saturday and Sunday so you don't feel so guilty about the fine dining. The bonus is that it takes three rounds of golf to get up there, and three rounds of golf to get home. And Michigan is LOADED with great golf courses. Also, Arthur Hills is from Toledo Ohio, and he works a lot in that area. In case you haven't been paying attention, Arthur Hills is the greatest golf course designer ever birthed. It is my intention to play every course he has or will design and I have a list of 162 right now. To date, I've played ten. So I still have some targets out there to shoot for. On this trip we played 4 Arthur Hills designs out of 6 courses.
Honeywell Golf Course (www.golfus.com/honeywell) in Wabash, In. is an Arthur Hills design built in 1980. The course is mostly open and flat. However, on the backside holes 11 through 14 go back in the woods and are beautiful holes. It's a nice course for the price ($30). After golf we drove on the South Bend, In. for dinner at the LaSalle Grill. It's a 4 star restaurant and the reason we stay in South Bend.
Thursday we drove to Cadillac, Michigan to play Eldorado (www.golfeldorado.com). Bob Meyer designed this course in 1996 and he did a great job. The course is in great shape and they have two Cadillac's parked in the clubhouse. The course requires many carries over water or marsh. My wife lost several balls while carding four 9's. Nine is her maximum number and she has grown to hate that number. If you're in Cadillac, eat at Hermann's European Café.
Friday we made it to Traverse City and played Mistwood, which is about 20 miles west of town. They have 3 nine-hole layouts, which are labeled Red, White and Blue. The wife and I played Red and White and I played them from the blue tees. We played on lovely green grass beneath beautiful blue skies filled with puffy white clouds. It was a really colorful day and we both played well and got around in 3 hours and 20 minutes. Mostly I remember the fast greens.
After golf, we drove up the LeeLenau Peninsula and checked into the Sunset Lodge in Omena, Michigan (www.omenasunsetlodge.com) for the weekend. We did the bike tour with Steve and Janice, friends from California. It was a reunion of old biking buddies. After the bike tour ended, we stopped at a local winery to load up on Michigan wine and then headed downstate to visit our favorite only daughter. She is in Oxford, Michigan so of course I found a couple of Arthur Hills courses in the vicinity.
Fieldstone Golf Course (www.gmarmion@fieldstonegolfclub.com) is a 1998 creation. The layout is great and the greens and fairways are bent grass and in great shape. I found two problems. The tee boxes are badly beat up and the course is practically in an office park so it is about to be surrounded by tall buildings. They don't make a very nice backdrop for pictures.
The next day we played Pine Trace in Rochester Hills, Mi. (www.pinetracegolf.com). We played this course with Bob, a local golfer. It is good he was there because we could have gotten lost on the convoluted, intersecting cart trails. I believe Mr. Hills was not given quite enough acres for this course. Most holes are fine but crisscrossing cart paths do not indicate 'plenty of room for a course'.
Wednesday we moved into Ohio and played Weatherwax Golf Course in Middletown. This is a very interesting course design situation. Weatherwax has 36 holes. They play it as 4 separate 9 holes rather than 2 18-hole courses. On the scorecard they give an overhead view of the layout showing that all 36 holes are laid out on a regular rectangle of land. Anyone looking at that layout would say, "holy cow, I'll be in another fairway all day." It looks real tight on the picture, and the idea of getting four #1 tees and four #9 greens near the clubhouse seems daunting. In this case Arthur had enough acres and the two nines we played were pretty wide open. All 4 nines go out links style and turn at #5 to return to the clubhouse. We arrived early for our tee time, but were told to see the starter. I told him we would play any combination if we could get out quickly since rain was a threat later in the day. Of course I also knew Mr. Hills would not design 2 good nines and two bad ones. The starter glanced over this shoulder, made a couple of marks on my card to indicate we would play the Meadows, followed by Valley View. He also told me it was an Arthur Hills design and we would like it. I liked him right away and gained even more respect as we caught the group in front of us on our 18th hole after a 3 hour 10 minute round with only one sprinkle of rain to keep us moving. It was a great ending to a great trip.