How would it turn out today? Golf and I meet again, we haven't seen each other for almost two days. We arranged to meet at the seventh oldest golf club in the world.
As already said Fraserburgh is a city of medium size for the Scottish Highlands. Wait a minute: In my completely egocentric way, referring exclusively to me and my progress, not looking to the right, not to the left, I completely overlooked the fact that I had already left the Highland two days ago. Approximately at the point where my gear shifter left me for a short time, the border between the Highlands and the Lowlands runs. But that doesn't change the fact that the cities here are neither big nor numerous. Contrary to the hotel manager's estimation, I found the city very lively on this grey, rough and windy Friday and first rolled a little through the streets. I was on the search: After a launderette and a breakfast café. Life is quite predictable if you go on a longer bike tour and neither the weather nor the technical equipment are particularly capricious: eating, drinking, sleeping, washing. As sleeping the last night took place in a room with fixed walls, a good bed and no other flatmates, this point was checked off. As far as the handling of the washing of clothes was concerned, the infrastructure on the campsites that had been visited so far was very good. Actually there was always both, washing machine and dryer. Surprisingly, I was not able to find a launderette in Fraserburgh. Or at least none I dared to go into, because I had found Paddy's Suds after a few minutes, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to open the red door:
Even if it doesn't look like that on the picture, Paddy seemed to have mixed soapy water, but my confidence in the mixture wasn't big enough. Well, then it was one or two days to get by with the reasonably clean remaining laundry.
It was much easier to find a café, because right next to my hotel, whose breakfast service I wouldn't use until the next morning, there was a nice café which seemed to be dedicated to the students of the town. As so often in recent times, I sat there, ate, drank and wrote. After the creative day's work was done, I made my way to the course.
There was no trace of rain. The wind was also invisible, but that didn't stop him from blowing quite constantly and violently. That was already a glimpse of the days to come, some of which were made extremely interesting with this element. On the way to the course - almost boring: Once again James Braid had his fingers in the pie, in 1922 he revised the course design, which has remained almost unchanged until today - I had the wind in my back, always a pleasant thing for the cyclist. On the course, however, the changing direction of play caused changing feelings towards the heavenly child.
The club, which - once again unchecked by me in complete journalistic disinterest, but cited with confidence - claims to be the seventh oldest golf club in the world and the fifth-oldest in Scotland, referring to the Golf Museum in St Andrews, lost its clubhouse and all its historical records in a fire in 2004. Now, after the clubhouse - which I would not have thought to be all that new if I had looked at it briefly - has been successfully rebuilt, people there are trying to reconstruct as much as possible by researching archives. After all, the foundation could be dated April 14, 1777, using documents from the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh.
The place is a very decent representative of the category Links. The first and the 18th hole will probably never receive a prize for originality, but the remaining 16 holes are extremely entertaining. These are separated from the first mentioned by a hill, Corbie Hill, or better said this hill makes the character of many holes. The funny thing is that the first track, which - apart from the fact that you can see the hill - has nothing to do with this hill, bears the name "Corbie Hill".
Perhaps one has thought: There could be so many tracks bearing the name, so we would rather avoid them arguing afterwards and give this name to a completely different one.
In any case, it goes up the hill (lanes 2, 4, 8), down (lanes 3, 9) or past it, which was a decisive aspect in view of the wind conditions, because the hill had a considerable influence on the draughts. The greens of the course were also anything but boring, stepped, raised, with sloping edges and besides - which is actually hardly worth mentioning, because it is simply the norm up here - well maintained and true to play. A really recommendable course, which can also be played at fair prices, especially if you have enough golf fuel in your tank to play several rounds, because the day ticket was only 10 pounds more expensive than the single round.
But for me that was exactly the drop of bitterness: My tank was pretty empty. It was hard to say what it would have looked like on a less windy day. But on that day, when even putting was hard because the ball didn't stay still and the roaring in my ears clouded my judgement about direction and speed, I was sure after two thirds of the round that I wasn't able to play a second or even a third. The doubts I had about golf in the last few days were confirmed. But basically I was just physically tired after the last weeks, which had been a lot of fun, but also a lot of strain for my sub-high performance athlete body. If you know my golf game, you might think now: I don't need my body for the almost 100 meters I hit it with the driver anyway. Apparently I do.
I drove from the golf course quickly to a Tesco, bought a range of salty, sweet and fruity treats and spent the rest of the rather uncomfortable day on my comfortable hotel bed, but still happy and watched light cuisine for the brain on TV, which entertained me very well.
I solemnly lend the day the Phoenix Prize for a club that came out of the ashes. It was really not his fault that I couldn't fully embrace him. I'll come back again, I promise.