Scotland--good Scotch, great beer, and incredible golf part 1

So my incredible wife decided to let me take a trip of a lifetime to Scotland!  It is funny to think that I almost didn't bring my golf clubs to Germany, not sure of how much time I would have to golf with all of the traveling we wanted to do.  Luckily our neighbor is quite a golf enthusiast so when he talked about a trip that he was planning and a couple of the originally picked friends couldn't make it, and after Tammy said I could, I jumped on the opportunity and man I am glad I did.  What an incredible trip!  I went with my neighbor Serg and his long time friend Andre on the golfers trip of a lifetime. 
After landing we had a couple of hours to drive to the town of St. Andrews, named for the cathedral http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/standrews/cathedral/index.html there and later the golf course has also taken on the name. 

 

 

These are pictures from just outside the room we stayed in when we first got there, the first is to show the weather when we first got there and the 2nd was the next day.  Unfortunately it didn't look like we were going to have very good weather leading up to the trip but we had a couple of really great days of weather, I am sure it has something to do with all of the praying we were doing for good weather.  The place we stayed in was a bed and breakfast that was connected to a pub!  I literally walked from my room through 2 doors and into the pub. 

This is a picture of us standing behind the bar.  The picture over our heads is of the owner/chef/bar tender John with a pro, I think it is Nick Faldo.  I am sure that the golf fans that will read this will know for sure who though.  The pub was great and the food was awesome.  We didn't get settled into the room until about 4:30pm so we had a couple of beers after toasting our trip with a little Scotch that Andre brought and threw some darts.  Well after a few we finally ate and had a couple more and then decided to take a walk out into town to see what night life was out there.  You could really tell that none of us had been out in a while and were set to enjoy our first night on the town!

This is just a picture of us heading up the road from the pub.

This is looking down one of the main streets toward the St. Andrews Cathedral.

 

 

This is the plaque that was out in front of the building pictured, I thought it was very interesting.

This was just next to a different pub we checked out that night, you have to go through the arch to get to the rest of downtown.

The next day, me not feeling the greatest after a few too many the night before, headed out to play our first golf course--Gleneagles.  Here is a link to the site for the course if you want to check it out http://gleneaglegc.com/course/ as well as a couple of pictures of us on the course.

This one is right at the entry to where the clubhouse is located.

This is with the starter, most of the people we met at each of the courses were really great about us being a little touristy from time to time.

This is a view from right across from the clubhouse, absolutely beautiful.

One of the views from the course, the entire area was gorgeous and we even saw a dear at one point.

This was after a very sorry drive I hit, just a great picture showing one of the fairways.  The area was so beautiful that there was a photo shoot going on while we were teeing off on the 9th hole.

 

 It was an incredible course and we were so geeked out about being there it was really surreal to start with.  It took me until the back 9 to finally feel normal and started playing decently.  I posted a 110 at Gleneagle, which will be the home of the 2014 Ryder Cup (again, the golf fans will know how cool that really is).  After our round we had a beer in the clubhouse and did a little souvenir shopping, the clubhouse was really cool too.  The locker room had lockers, padded seats, showers, a sauna and even a person to hand out towels and what not, we were told that if it rained on us that the clubhouse would dry our clothes while we waited in the locker room!  After the round we headed back to St. Andrews and called it a night kind of early.
The next day we had a later tee time so after breakfast (I got to try haggis with breakfast, pretty good actually) we headed over to the Old Course to see the British Golf museum http://www.britishgolfmuseum.co.uk/ which was really cool. 

 I thought that this was too cool not to take a picture of.  It is a part of the women in golf area that they had at the museum.  Too funny!

This is a picture of pants that Gary Player wore during the British Open as a protest to apartheid in South Africa.

After the museum we stopped to talk to the player assistant to see how we could get on the course the next day.  Unfortunately it is not an easy course to get on to, you can book a tee time but you have to do it about a year in advance to get on, or you can pay about $1000 and you can get on (which is just ridiculous), or you can try the lotto system that they have (which is what we did but missed out, darn it!).  Well the main player assistant there said that if we showed up early the next day that we might be able to get on so we asked what time and he said 6 am so we did just that, more on the results later.  After talking with the starter and a couple of the people there, we decided to check out the shops that were near by, the first one was the Tom Morris shop.  This is a link about Tom Morris http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wgv.com%2Fhof%2Fmember.php%3Fmember%3D1084  I hope that you can all see these links ok.  The skinny on Old Tom Morris is that he was a ball maker, greens keeper and course designer.  He actually came up with many ideas that are now the foundation of golf as we know it.  He and his son, Young Tom Morris, also won the British open something like 8 out of the first 12 played there.  The shop is said to be the one that Old Tom actually started.  Pretty cool really, the other shops were also really cool and the 3 of us were drooling over most of the items.  After doing a little shopping we ate and headed to Carnoustie http://www.carnoustiegolflinks.co.uk/media-webcam/full-history-of-carnoustie
Carnoustie was amazing and the weather was incredible!  Most of the locals that we talked to couldn't believe how nice the weather was that day too.  The course is incredibly difficult and the bunkers are just silly to try to get out of, the sand in them is better that on most of the beaches that I have been on too.  The only real problem was the wind was blowing and making the round extra tough.  Oh and the rough was just that, very deep and being spring there not easy to get out of.  We tee'd off on a 214 yard par 3 into the wind with driver and none of reached the green--ridiculous.  It was just so surreal being there though. I also golfed pretty well that day despite the conditions and scored a 97!  After the round we ate and had a beer at the hotel there which was just awesome!