Bandon Dunes

Ask five people at Bandon Dunes which course is the best and you will get five different answers, and the argument does not resolve itself by the end of the trip. If anything it gets worse. That is the actual charm of the place -- not that there is a correct hierarchy of five links courses on the Oregon coast, but that there isn't, and everyone insists there is anyway.

Pacific Dunes usually wins the argument on day one. Doak's routing does not care that you just got off a plane -- the wind picks a direction on the first tee and changes by the sixth, and the ground moves under a shot in ways flat courses back home never prepared anyone for. It is the course most groups play first, mostly because it is the one that convinces people Bandon is real. Ask that same group again on day three and the votes start to scatter.

Old Macdonald is where the scattering usually lands. Tom Doak and Jim Urbina built it as a tribute to C.B. Macdonald's template holes -- big double-plateau greens, blind approaches, angles that only make sense once you've seen them twice -- and it plays like a different course the second time through. First-time groups tend to rank it last. Groups on their third trip tend to rank it first, and get oddly insistent about it. Nothing else on the property rewards repetition the same way.

Bandon Dunes itself, the original Kidd design from 1999, feels looser and more improvised than anything built after it -- which is exactly why some groups prefer it to both of the above. Bandon Trails pulls the trip inland through dunes and pine forest. On the one day the wind turns everything else into a fight, Trails is usually the round that saves the trip's mood.

Sheep Ranch has its own camp of defenders, and they are not wrong either. Coore and Crenshaw ran the routing along the cliff edge with almost nothing between a shot and the drop, and on a calm morning it is as good as golf gets on this coast. A rough afternoon is a different argument entirely -- the same holes that felt spectacular at eight can feel unreasonable by two. That split is exactly why the Sheep Ranch camp and the Pacific Dunes camp rarely agree on anything.

None of this gets settled at dinner, either. The debate just moves indoors. Whoever is losing the argument by the ninth hole tends to keep pushing it at the bar, and by night two most groups have an unofficial ranking they'll happily revise the next morning. Caddies have opinions too, and rarely the same opinion twice in a row -- ask three of them which course they'd play on a day off and expect three different answers, none of them shy about it.

The walking-only rule is what groups consistently underestimate before they arrive. Bodies get tired in a way that isn't unpleasant but is noticeable by day two. Hiring a caddie for at least the first couple of rounds is worth it regardless of which side of the course debate they land on -- they read greens better than anyone will on unfamiliar ground, and the argument on the walk is half the entertainment.

A standard four-round trip runs Pacific Dunes, Bandon Dunes, Old Macdonald, and Bandon Trails. Trails isn't the optional fifth round it looks like on paper -- skip it to save a day and there's a real chance it's the round the group misses most on the drive home. If something has to come off the schedule, it's Sheep Ranch -- the one round that depends on the wind behaving, and wind is the one thing nobody can promise eighteen months out. There's no wrong order for the four you do play. Only an unresolved argument that gets picked back up every time the group returns.

That return is the part worth planning for. Nobody comes back to Bandon to settle the debate. They come back because the debate is still going.