GHIN
If you missed it, catch up on my colleague Casey’s debut G&T dispatch from last week. The heater that she’s been on for the last few weeks between travel, music and activities is pretty wild, and I read about her trip to Ireland with wistfulness. I rue the fact that it’s been well over five years since my first and only visit to Carne. On top of that, Casey and her husband Jon visited Mulranny, a rustic little links about 30 miles south of Carne that had been firmly on our itinerary for Tourist Sauce Season 4, until we realized nothing was going to pull us away from what remains one of the all-time days in NLU history on that links in Belmullet.
The (DJ) Kilmore Nine at Carne
And that’s the conundrum, ever more so as we age and our families grow and the business grows: how to balance exploring the new and revisiting the old? Some of my most cherished memories have come upon second and third visits to places - digging deeper on a course and it revealing more and more over several loops or in a different season, reconnecting with people who became friends the first time around, taking pride in going back to somewhere that left an outsized impact on your journey, wanting another crack at a certain shot. On the other hand, there’s always that next place to go to, even within the same region. I’m jonesing to get to Gamble Sands, but I’m also intent on getting back to Gearhart or Chambers Bay. Royal County Down is on the list. Does a trip back to Carne get tacked onto that one? There’s only so much time to go around. And when you look at it all in totality it becomes daunting and intimidating, especially when factoring in non-golf trips, family trips and other hobbies.
The Dunhill Links is this week on the east coast of Scotland, which makes me realize it’s been over six years since I’ve been back to the Highlands. You can bury me at Brora or Dornoch, and yet somehow I went twice in 2018 and have never been back. Another New Zealand trip, Iceland, getting down to Hobart, Portugal, half a dozen different regions of England, Argentina, Japan, South Africa, Northern Europe, Western Canada, a dozen different parts of our own country. As we sit here doing 2025 and 2026 planning, how do you balance the familiar and the unknown? There’s always the risk of going back to a place and it not living up to that first trip, or that group of people you were with, or the conditions you got. Or heading to a new spot in search of some magic and being let down and wishing you would’ve just taken the opportunity to head back to the place you loved the first time. These certainly aren’t problems - it’s part of the magic. And there’s no right answer or recipe. The biggest thing is committing fully to each trip and planning it in a way that there’s enough depth and variety and adventure that it’s impossible to have a bad time. And if it all adds up to something a lot greater than the sum of its parts, you file it away and don’t let anything stop you from getting back there, even if it’s a decade down the road. If you bring a friend or two to enjoy it without the cameras.
The Midnight Troubadour
Tough and timeless, this polo is built for the long ride. Featuring a crisp, non-collapsing collar and a rugged, stretchy fabric, it's the perfect shirt for any cowboy's wardrobe.