Walking the Old Course

When we told people we were moving to St. Andrews last spring, there were usually two responses:

"That's where Prince William went to school, right?" (Less common, but true)

or

"So, you guys play golf?" (Nope)

If you didn't know that St. Andrews is pretty much the birthplace of golf, well, you do now! And the Old Course is legendary, if you're into that sort of thing. I mean, check out this description of the course from Golf.com:

The Old Course is a living church where pilgrims don't have to sing from the same hymnbook.

Epic. So, anyways, golf and Prince William are pretty much the big claims to fame around here - and since PW has graduated and moved on to being royal elsewhere (although we've still got all the extra CCTV cameras installed for his stay), it's pretty much just golf now.

For some reasons having to do with land ownership and old historical stuff, the Old Course is open to the public on Sundays so people can walk on it. We've been here for two months now, so it seemed like it was time to get in touch with the golfing culture by strolling on the hallowed soil.



You may not be able to tell from the pictures (ha), but let me assure you that the course is HUGE. We walked for about an hour before following (or creepily stalking) two older gentleman as they showed us a shortcut back to the main road into town. And by shortcut I mean walking across someone's golf game. But the guys we were following had tweed caps and looked like they belonged, so Matt decided to just pretend like he was walking with them. Except he clearly was NOT with them. They gave us weird looks.



Oh, and this is one of the epic sand traps on the course. This is actually a fairly shallow one, but some of them were deep enough that you could get inside and not really see out. Sadly, we didn't experiment with this and take pictures. Maybe next Sunday.




In the meantime, here's a picture of us being stereotypical/snobby St. Andrews students: hanging on the golf course, wearing Wayfarers, and taking pictures of ourselves. I think Matt is trying to make his posh face.



Well, we're off to eat dinner at a friend's house as soon as Matt finishes his 500 words on the dissertation for the day. I don't have anything else particularly exciting to report, except that we recently purchased two one-way tickets to Edinburgh for after Christmas. Mark your calendars, people in the Northwest, because we're coming your way for five whole weeks: Dec. 16 - Jan 23rd!