Sandy Hills

Tuesday October 2. 2012 The Ryder Cup is over. The Presidential debate is imminent. We have one more warm-up round before the Great North Links Challenge. Today our golf was played at the Sandy Hills course at Rosapenna. The weather projection was for wind and rain, but we escaped with raindrops on only a few holes. Today our challenge was the golf course. Sandy Hills is a difficult test of golf skills----in fact it is just too hard. The fairways are narrow, bunkers have collection slopes, elevated greens push approach shots off to the rough, and the long thick grass swallows golf balls in the rough like the eighteenth hole at every miniature golf course. Errant shots which stray only slightly from the straight and narrow are unplayable or lost. This is a golf-ball-eating machine. Haggerty and Healy took on Considine and Farrell in a rematch of the Donegal Duel. Mediocre golf dominated the day, but Wagon and Buff prevailed on the seventeenth hole. After the round, we revisited the incomparable Harbour Bar, ate another superb dinner at Rosapenna, and toasted golf and friendship with our new friends from Northern Ireland. Tomorrow we will travel to Ballyliffin to compete in the Great North Links Challenge. The reason we have traveled to Ireland. We have practiced enough. Tomorrow we need to answer the bell and somehow keep our tee balls in paly, and post 3 of 4 stableford scores. We need to salvage some American pride in the aftermath of the Ryder Cup debacle. Weather forecast: low 50's; 40% chance of rain; 30-35 winds. A warm zephyr over here. Stay tuned...