Busy Start

Since arriving at our very nice exchange home here on the Sunshine Coast we have been very busy.

Our accommodation is in a 3 bedroom bungalow, with a

ir con, 

tile floors, double garage and a wonderful yard. We have a  nice pool at the back and we love to sit out there for meals, happy hour and at other times. It is very relaxing watching 

the water. So far I have been in each 

day for a brief period of time.

We are just a few hundred metres from the beach we have to walk across the road and down a little 

path through the dunes. The beach stretches for about 8kms in each dire

ction. We have managed one walk on the beach for an hour the first day.

Two days after arriving we had to go to the Gold Coast to do some work and pick up our golf clubs from Darryl. It takes about 2.5 hrs to reach the south end of the Gold Coast. We p

icked up the remaining membership cards from Twin Towns, Coolangatta Tweed and Tweed Bowls.

For the golfers arriving the first week of February please remember to ask Darryl for your membership cards and your golf book when you 

pick up your rental car.

We also meet with our new real estate agent as we will be replacing Kingscliff  next year. This way we will have everyone in the Coolangatta area. The name of the new agent is Stringham Real Estate. They have some excellent basic condos , some good intermediate and some outstanding high priced ones. We will still do the Hill and Twin Towns as our major resorts.

We spent two night with Darryl and Denise. They have put in a good size pool with all the trimmings. It is very nice.

The second day our first golfers of 2009 arrived. They landed at 0955 and got on the 1115 shuttle. They arrive at 1400 at the car rental agency. We expected them about 1245 so I called to see where they were and if they had got the shuttle. It turns out that the bus was full and they had to stop at a lot of other hotels prior to reaching us. The clients did not mind as the weather was warm, the bus had AC and they got a tour. 

The weather has been warm around 28 to 29 but the last two days were very windy. Today the wind stopped and Beth and I went and played our first round since October first. We played at Mount Coolum.

It is a good course and we have always enjoyed it when we have played there in the past.

We use the www.golfincanada.ca format for evaluation courses. There are 10 categories each worth 10 pts. The main ones are Greens, Fairways, Tees, Design, Difficulty, Value, Scenic with Club House, Staff and Others rounding out the 10. 

Mt Coolum scored well on greens, fairways, difficulty, design, value and scenic categories but lower on tees, club house, staff and others. I gave it a 74. We paid $37 each with the discount book and $32 for the power cart. 

Most non resort courses only offer blue and white tees for men and red for the ladies. Blue tees are only used by members and club completions. This limits your choices of which tees to play as we always have to play from the white. Because of this tee boxes are limited and not a lot of effort goes into making them attractive. Also all score cards give the distance in metres from the blue tees and red tees. 

If you have not purchased a golf gps system it is not too late. Go on the www.golfincanada.ca website and get one. Then you can down load all the course in Australia that you are going to play. If in doubt write me and I will give you list. Having a Gps really helps as it gives you distance to the front, center, and back of greens as well as some custom points. The distance is in yardage and it makes it a lot easier then trying to convert from metres to yards. Also you do not have to look for metre stakes and pace off the distances so you play faster. I recommend them to you.

I was happy with the first round since it was over three months since I last swung a club.

Coming home last night we were fortunate to see the Fruit Bats. There were heaps of them. If you are wondering about the Fruit Bats have a look in the archives as there is one blog about them.

Since I collect special Australian words and I like to let you know what some of them are so you can understand the language here. The word is sparkie. Sparkie is an electrician. If you would like to see a larger list again check in the archives for a blog on how the Aussies shorten the words and but an IE on the end.