This year has been one of the strangest in all my 64 years. COVID-19 has laid waste to any semblance of a normal life. And the year started with so much promise.
With my brother living the good life in sunny and golf crazy Florida (crazy is the word for that state) I had planned another week of golfing there to bookend my prior December jaunt there. I had pushed my normal February week into March to clear my calendar for my daughter’s wedding.
The last day of February saw all my clan gather in Manhattan for what was the most amazing and joyous wedding weekend as my baby girl took her vows. It was about as great a day as a dad and anyone else who was there could imagine. The kids took a brief mini honeymoon and when they got back in the first week of March all hell broke loose.
Yes, the pandemic had hit New York and we were all shut down and shut out of just about everything. Now, luckily we all have survived without any major issues but it’s now August and I have had enough.
You see today was to be the day my brother and I touched down in Scotland for another of our yearly Scottish holidays. But of course with all that is happening we had to cancel and the next two weeks while I am here in the Hudson Valley and not roaming the links of Scotland I’m going to be in a foul mood. Heed the warning: I’m grumpy, don’t piss me off.
We had it all planned and booked and mostly paid for. It was to be thirteen days of golf and whisky and history and tradition and gin and tonics and fish and chips and cullen skink and haggis and Tenets and sore feet and gorse and lost balls and laughs and laughs and laughs. And links golf and more links golf and more after that.
Even the best laid plans …. as they say. And these were good plans. Having planned a few earlier trips we kind of got the hang of knowing what we want and where we want it. This would have been our fourth trip in five years and we were to visit plenty of new courses hit a few we had played already and spend some time in an area where we hadn’t stayed in yet.
It was to be glorious of course. It is this trip that gets me through the rest of the year. We spend a month or two figuring where we want to go and the links courses on our hit list and then another month finalizing the tee times and reservations. We had this baby all set. And then the pandemic hit.
Well, it’s certainly a “first world problem” and I know it’s a little bit much for me to whine about a missed vacation when there are more important matters concerning all of us.
But I won’t be screwed out of my Scottish Links Golf vacation. I choose to take it, at least in my own mind. Like a virtual vaca, like a virtual tour of the Smithsonian or the zoo tours that are so popular on line now.
I may be stuck here in the United States of Crazy but I can let my imagination take me to my beloved links land.
So that’s what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks here. I’ll be recounting my trip, my imaginary trip with my brother and I walking those hallowed links and sipping those wee drams.
I can’t be there physically but I can daydream my way through the next two weeks full of all the things I know we would have loved doing.
So get ready for George and Jeff’s Virtual Vacation. No passport required, just some imagination and a little whisky.
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