There is a bagpiper at Spanish Bay every evening at dusk. He walks the edge of the links as the sun drops behind the Pacific and plays until the light is gone. Nobody asks him to stop. Nobody wants him to. You stand there outside your room with whatever you're drinking and you listen, and the Monterey Peninsula does what it has always done. Makes you feel like you ended up somewhere that most people only dream about.

Stayed at the Inn at Spanish Bay and played all three. The Links at Spanish Bay first, the wind off the Pacific making every club decision a negotiation. Then Spyglass Hill. Five holes through the coastal dunes with the ocean in front of you, then it turns inland into the Del Monte Forest and stays. Hole four, Blind Pew, a 370-yard par four with a green sunken between dunes barely ten yards wide and surrounded by ice plant. Jones called it his favorite par four he ever designed. Standing over a wedge into that target you understand exactly what he meant.

Then Pebble Beach. The only thing worth saying is what it felt like on the first tee with the fog still lifting off Carmel Bay. Knees shaking. Hit a breakfast ball. No shame in it. The nerves settled around the fourth hole and from there I was just trying to stay present for all of it. The par three seventh barely a hundred yards with ocean everywhere, eight and nine on the bluffs, the eighteenth coming home along the water. What happened to the scorecard I honestly could not tell you. Between the transfusions at the turn and the fact that time moves differently when you are having that much fun, the numbers are a blur. The feeling is not.

The steakhouse at the Lodge does not come cheap. Order it anyway. The service is its own category.

Somewhere between the bagpiper at dusk and the walk home along eighteen with the bay beside you, you stop thinking about the score entirely. It's in the walking.

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