The rule for this column is simple: a course has to be worth the drive on its own, not as a stop on the way to something better. Cheap is good. Cheap and interesting is the whole game. Here are three I would drive an hour and a half for, plus what to do after, because a course without a place to sit afterwards is only half a course.
1. Ridgeline Municipal — the greens are a rumour
Forty minutes out of town, past the last gas station and up a road that stops pretending to be paved. Ridgeline is a 1960s municipal that has been maintained by people who clearly love it and funded by people who clearly don't. Fairways are generous. Bunkers are few. The greens are fast, glassy, and utterly shameless about refusing a good putt.
What makes it worth the drive is the routing: the front nine climbs, the back nine falls, and holes seven through eleven run along a ridge with the whole valley sitting there being a valley. It costs less than a round at the range-heavy resort forty minutes further on, and there is never a wait after 2pm.
Bring: a half set, a flask of something brown, and a tolerance for greens that will make you say a word you don't usually say. Avoid: the ninth tee box, where the ground is so hard you'll need a hammer and a friend.
2. Harlow Hill Nine — no bunkers, no excuses
A nine-hole course on a hill, built in 1921 by people who had a hill and a budget and no interest in sand. There is not a single bunker on the property. Instead the defence is the hill itself: every approach is uphill, downhill, or across a slope, and the wind arrives without warning from three directions in the space of one hole.
You will play nine holes in an hour and forty minutes, walking, and you will be tired in a way eighteen on flat ground never makes you. The 4th is a 240-yard par three that plays like a 180-yard par three if you catch the downslope, and like a 300-yard par four if you don't. The 8th green is a trampoline. I have never parred it and I think about it weekly.
The clubhouse is one room, opens at seven, does toast, and lets you sit on a bench looking at the valley until you feel like a person again. Green fee is the price of two coffees and a sandwich in the city.
A good nine-hole course is not a short eighteen. It is a complete argument, made in nine paragraphs, about what golf is for.
3. Saltmarsh Links — the resort track that didn't have to be good
This is the expensive one, and I hesitated to include it. Saltmarsh is attached to a hotel with a spa and a lobby that smells like a candle called "Dune". It did not need to be a good golf course. Resorts survive on weddings and conference bookings. The golf can be a rectangle with flags.
It isn't. The back nine runs through actual saltmarsh on ground the developers clearly weren't allowed to move, and the result is a stretch of holes that feel found rather than built: long carries over reeds, greens tucked behind humps, a par three at 15 that is 150 yards over water with nothing between you and a very public failure. Play it in the shoulder season, midweek, late afternoon, when the rate drops and the light goes copper.
Bring: enough balls for the marsh, which keeps them. Stay after: the bar has a deck, the deck has heaters, and the bartender makes a drink with gin, elderflower, and a cucumber that I have twice tried and once failed to reproduce.
The flask rule
One flask, shared, at the turn, in a cup that isn't plastic. Not on the front nine, not on the way home, and never in the cart's cup holder where it can be forgotten. The flask is not about drinking, it's about having a small ceremony in the middle of a walk. Courses that forbid it are telling you something about their priorities, and you should believe them.
Three courses, three drives, one flask between all of them. That is a season of Saturdays, and none of them require a plane.
