A Quest for St Andrews
As a lifelong golfer, visiting St Andrews has always been a dream of mine. Several times now it has felt like it might become a reality, but each time my hopes have been dashed.
My first missed opportunity was nobody’s fault but my own. During my PhD studies at Vanderbilt University, one of my main projects involved a collaboration with researchers at MIT and INRIA (the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology). I was lucky enough to visit the INRIA center near Nice, France a few times, including July of 2015. I knew that the Open was happening at St Andrews just before my Nice visit, but it didn’t occur to me until it was too late to change my travel plans that I might be able to go. I’ll forever regret not making that legendary tournament.
As an aside, I was actually listening to the coverage of that Sunday round on a layover flight on my way to France. Our plane dropped below 10,000 feet or whatever altitude the internet drops out just when Jordan Spieth made his putt on 16 keeping him within striking distance of his third leg of the Grand Slam. We landed in my layover city (Dallas, maybe) and I had to run through the terminal to find a TV to see the finish.
Fast forwarding a few years, in the summer of 2022 I won the ticket lottery for the 2023 Open Championship at Royal Liverpool. Liverpool is a long way from St Andrews, but if we were going to plan a trip to the UK, I’d do my best to work it in. My wife and I started preparing for the trip, but then we found out we were having a baby. Little Graham was born in March of 2023.
Carmen and I decided against leaving the country without him for a week, so I sold my tickets. My plans had been thwarted again, this time by someone I’d never met.
Carmen insisted that if I got tickets again in the next few years that we could make a family trip out of it. I don’t think she, conditioned by my tales of the Masters ticket lottery wait times, was expecting this to happen so soon, but I hit the lottery again for the 2024 Open at Troon. I found out that they offered free tickets for kids, and Carmen gave me the go ahead.
As the tournament approached, we decided to make it a long trip. We would spend a week in Scotland, including tournament tickets from Tuesday through Friday, and we would also visit Iceland for 3 days on the way home. Our home base for Scotland would be in Glasgow, as it was much too expensive to stay closer to Troon.
Carmen is a hiker, a world traveler, and somehow unbothered with all of my very boring hobbies (golf, math, etc). She has been to several golf tournaments with me, and, if that isn’t bad enough, she’s watched me play more than a few times. She started researching activities for our non-golf days, and the calendar started to fill up. I looked up the travel times from Glasgow to St Andrews and pushed to add one more golf day to the itinerary. Thankfully, she was excited for it, too.
In the months prior to our trip, I learned from Tom Coyne’s A Course Called Scotland, that the Old Course is closed for golf but open to the public to walk on Sundays. Our trip had us arriving in Scotland on Saturday, and I held out hope that if jetlag wasn’t too bad we could take the 3ish hour bus trip to St Andrews on our first full day in Scotland. Deep down, I was more excited to visit the home of golf and walk the Old Course than I was for the Open, but please don’t tell anyone in the ticket office. I even offered to skip some days of the tournament if we needed to fit in other excursions, so long as we could go to St Andrews.
Our first flight left Denver heading towards Iceland for a layover on Friday night. We were hopeful that we could get Graham to sleep a little early on the plane and start adjusting to the 7 hour time difference. As it often goes with toddlers, he had other plans. We did get him down for two hours or so, but it was a restless sleep and mom and dad were basically up the entire 7 hour overnight flight. Alas, we arrived at Keflavik Airport at around 6 AM Saturday morning and hoped for some sleep during our 4 hour layover. Again, Graham had other plans.
Terminal D was pretty crammed, but we found some seats away from the bulk of the crowd, although the little guy preferred repeatedly running directly towards the masses. At some point we decided we needed coffee to survive, so, in what was obviously in hindsight a terrible idea, I carried Graham to the coffee shop, purchased 2 coffees, and started walking back towards our seats. Surprising to no one in the airport but me, he knocked a coffee out of my hands, and it spilled half over my shirt and half over the airport floor.
It was around this time that I looked up our Air Tags for our checked bags to see if they had made it to Iceland, and I was alerted that my bag was still in Colorado. In fact, my bag wasn’t showing up at the airport. It was showing up at a house in Castle Rock. No our house, mind you. We don’t live in Castle Rock. I tried to gain the strength to worry, but I was too tired. I accepted my fate that I might be forced to wear the same coffee stained, St Jude t-shirt for the entirety of the trip.
After 4 hours that felt like 4 eons, we finally got on our next flight. To do so, we survived a freezing, rain soaked airport bus shuttle in Keflavik that woke us up, but not in a good way. Graham finally got some sleep on the two hour flight to Glasgow, but mom and dad were still up when we arrived on Saturday afternoon.
After checking in and taking a short walk, Carmen, always the adventurer, said that she would be up for going to a pub. Try as we might, we couldn’t find one where a stroller would fit, as most of them were packed. I didn’t realize just how lucky we were until a few minutes later when I was trying to turn on the TV at the AirBNB and repeatedly fell asleep before even opening the Netflix app.
As if it was up to our choice, our whole party went to bed early. I don’t remember a dream or getting up to pee or anything else from my bear-like slumber, but I awoke to morning sunshine and got out of bed to do some exploring. I looked out to Ingram Street from the large window in our flat’s living room and my mind wandered to thoughts of St Andrews. I prayed that everyone else had a restful nights sleep.
I’m always up early and usually have an hour or two to myself in the morning. After a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t checked the time since waking up, so I grab my phone only to see 10:15 displaying. Whew, I had slept for more than 12 hours and my family was still asleep… but wait… 10:15 July 13… Saturday, July 13… the same Saturday in which I had fallen asleep.
There was still light outside. It couldn’t be 10:15 PM. Also, I had just slumbered for hours. Had my phone not updated to the time changes after reaching Scotland? Even though I knew it had updated the day before, this would make some sense as it would put it at around 5:15 AM. I eagerly Googled, “what time is it in Glasgow,” only to see “10:15 PM”. I also looked up the sunset times for Glasgow only to find that it sets around 9:30, but can stay light for another hour or so in July.
I could not believe that I had only slept for a few hours based on how I felt. Thoughts of conspiracies went through my head, but who wouldn’t want me to know what day it was. The government? The R&A? Did Brandel Chamblee finally reach a breaking point from all the Tweets I had directed at him in the past? None of it made sense. I texted friends in the states to see what time it was there. They confusedly obliged and all evidence pointed to it being around 10:15 PM in Glasgow.
Around this time Carmen heard me tussling and asked what was going on. I explained my concerns. She said some sleepy version of “I feel weird too, but leave me alone.”
At some point, I accepted my fate. The next day my wife would explain REM cycles during jet lag. As a medical provider, it all made sense to her, but I was still suspicious. In any case, I got some more sleep and woke up at 6:00 AM on what the world seemed to agree was actually Sunday morning.
I had no idea how late my family would sleep, so a jet lagged St Andrews trip was still a coin flip. I began researching bus and train schedules just in case. Surprisingly, just a few minutes later, Carmen appeared and said she was up for the trip. She requested coffee and breakfast and I set off to find them. Quickly, I was reminded that Europe doesn’t open early like the US. I walked around for 30 minutes looking for coffee before finding the only shop open… that old Scottish favorite, McDonalds. I grabbed a few MacMuffins or whatever they are called in Scotland and some coffees and headed home. We feasted on my prey and prepared Graham for the trip.
At 8:40, we jumped on the M9 Megabus towards Aberdeen, and the reality set in. I was finally going to see the Old Course and the famous town, or so I thought.
Prior to the trip I read The Seventh at St Andrews by Scott Gummer detailing David McKlay Kidd’s design of the Castle Course at St Andrews. The book opens with a discussion of DMK seeing some players on a tee from his office and recognizing that they weren’t Scottish due to the fact that they were covered in Gore-Tex instead of a classic Scottish wool sweater. Coincidentally, I had just purchased a thick wool quarter zip that I was happy to find in a tall size (at 6’4 most sweaters look like crop tops on me, especially after being washed), and I took it as a sign that I should wear it as much as possible on my trip. I took great lengths to make sure it didn’t get smeared with peanut butter or applesauce or whatever Graham dined on leading up to the trip. I was proud to have made it on the bus to St Andrews dressed like a real Scot.
Most of my wife’s golf experiences exist around the Masters. The greatest thing that has ever happened to my family (other family members might disagree) was when my dad hit the long term Masters lottery in the early 2000s. I’ve been able to go most years since then. Carmen joined me for her first ever golf tournament and first ever anything golf related at the 2019 Masters. It just so happened that the 2019 Masters was the re-coronation of Tigers Woods. I cried more than I did at our wedding as he tapped in on 18. Hell, I mentioned that moment in my vows. She also attended in 2022 for Scottie Scheffler’s first green jacket.
She was decked out for our trip with a beautiful collared Masters sweatshirt and a Masters hat to go with bright white pants that Ian Poulter would have been proud to wear.
Graham was happy and playful to start the trip. Thankfully, his grandmother had been researching travel toys for weeks prior to our trip, and he was enjoying putting removable stickers on a panel in front of our seats on the second story of the Megabus. He had some milk. He had some snacks. Life was good.
Our small party was ready and excited for our next golf adventure when, an hour into our trip, Graham unleashed a monstrous amount of porridge, blueberries, and random snacks. This was no baby spit up. This was an eruption of a tiny man who was tired of traveling, which would have certainly rivaled that of any drunk leaving one of the pubs we skipped the night before.
I had been so worried about my sweater that I didn’t think to protect the most important garment in our wardrobe, my wife’s white pants. Graham covered them, and his sweater, pants, shoes, half of the seat, the Masters sweatshirt, the floor, and just about everything else present on the Megabus, except for me. I came out completely clean, but with a survivor’s conscience: It should have been me. Why wasn’t it me?
As I froze, Carmen snapped into action. Before I could blink Graham was undressed down to a diaper, strapped into a seat and facing forward as this was the treatment for Carmen’s diagnosis of him as being carsick. She went downstairs to the bus bathroom where she was greeted with something that can be best analogized as a portapotty from the last day of a music festival, shrunk down to the size of a large suitcase, and placed on a bounce house. It featured no working soap, strewn about toilet paper, and a handful of apparently tossed in from a distance paper towels. The water worked in the sink, but it was the kind where you had to hold ON with one hand while washing the other.
I watched Graham and mopped what I could with the supplies we had, while Carmen cleaned herself and Graham’s clothes. Against all odds we (using “we” here very liberally) returned the bus and ourselves to reasonable form. Carmen had a T-shirt and a rain jacket for herself and scrubbed the white pants down enough to make them wearable until our stop. We put Graham’s jacket on him with nothing but a diaper underneath.
We were approaching our stop in Dundee, from where we were supposed to take another 30ish minute bus ride into St Andrews. However, the prospect of continuing our trip seemed bleak. We were more worried about finding a clothing store open in Scotland on a Sunday morning. In fact, we settled for a coffee shop with a sink so that we could further clean everything, and get some milk for Graham, who was now cranky on an empty stomach. I suggested that we take our time in Dundee and then head back to Glasgow, but Carmen insisted that we push on. She did the bulk of the cleaning. She kept everyone calm. She made the trip possible in all ways.
Eventually, we made our way back to the bus station and set off for St Andrews. As long as the previous hours had been, this part of the journey flew by. Our focus on Graham’s belly took our attention off of the bus ride. We arrived at the bus stop at Grannie Clark’s Wynd at 11:45, almost exactly 2 hours after Graham’s explosion.
We could see the Swilcan Bridge and Burn from the bus stop and had a nearly unobstructed walk to them. Before I knew it, we had joined the line to take pictures on the famous bridge. As we neared the front of the line, realizing we hadn’t heard from Graham for awhile, we looked to find him peacefully asleep in the stroller. The Swilcan Bridge had waited 700 years for him to arrive. He decided that 10 minutes was too long to wait for it. There was nothing to do but laugh, get our own pictures taken, and take photos of him sleeping in front of the bridge to be used against him at a later date.
Graham taking a peaceful nap at the most famous bridge in golf.
He slept as I emptied my savings account on merchandise and as we dined in the R&A Museum’s Niblick Restaurant. He awoke just as we headed back to walk the course. We had actually made it.
I’ll have more to say about the St Andrews experience in a future post, but, in short, we had a phenomenal time walking the course as a family. Graham got to play in some bunkers, and he preferred the halfway house over the rest of the course. Carmen was shocked by the bunkers and crazy slopes. I annoyed them both trying to explain the history, tried to take in the view on every tee, and let it all sink in.
Due to the travel times and the delays of our outbound trip, we didn’t get to spend much time in the actual city, but the time on the course after all the struggles to get there and with my family will be a highlight of my life. We suffered through the 3 hour return trip that night (vomit free, but still exhausting), found a quieter pub for dinner, and settled in for an early, conspiracy theory free night.