There are days when I’m closer to shooting my weight than my age...

That's kinda how it was on our last day of our "Man Trip." Things started out well, with beautiful sky, sunshine and no wind. The weather prognosticators called for rain and cold temperatures as a cold front came in later in the afternoon. But if those guys in North Carolina are anything like my friend Jamie from Channel 7 in Dayton, who says the sky is falling every time it rains, I figured we had at least a 50-50 chance of fair and warmer.

Wrong. Those guys down there must have had more training or practice, because they were just about spot-on in their timing. We got off the first tee about noonish and had 3 or 4 holes in the nice weather. And it's a good thing the weather was nice, because my game had already packed its bags and was headed for home. I don't know why I can't play well on courses with that kind of grass in the fairways. I played really badly on a course like this one last year, and it was the same this year. Chuck told me after we had been playing for a while that this course had filed for bankruptcy and was trying to get back in action. It looked like it had been in trouble -- the fairways were chunky with large areas of bare ground, and the traps looked like they hadn't been worked for over a year. They had rain ruts running through them and not much more than a 1/4 inch of what was passing for sand and small gravel. Had we known this before hand, we certainly wouldn't have played it. But it was a Nicklaus course -- it should be good.

It's really frustrating to top and chunk the ball around the first 5 or 6 holes -- it doesn't give you much room for hope. On these kinds of days, I usually take solace in the weather and scenery, but that was quickly becoming a distraction.

Somewhere around the 8th or 9th hole, it started to rain and get cold. You know, the kind of short, menacing rain that is kinda like a 2-minute warning. Well, in golf, it's a 2-hole warning, 'cause in two holes it was really coming down, very windy and downright cold. We had a good time watching the Old Sergeant Major trying to hit this shot. Notice the ball about 3 feet to his left. Pretty much all of us had scores that looked more like a zip code than golf scores (4-5-9-3-9).

Of course, every round has a highlight, and this was no different. As we were coming down one fairway, rain pelting us, winds jostling the cards, and temperatures lower than our scores, there was some guy out on his patio, drinking a beer, who yelled down to us, "Are you guys from Canada?" I guess we must have looked like it, all decked out in our rain gear, playing in weather most self-respecting locals would have given up on long ago. Well, we laughed about that for the next few holes and every time we screwed up a shot, someone would make cracks about the shooter being a Canadian or something, or calling them a "hoser, eh!"

At one point, it got so bad we were taking shelter just about anywhere we could find it!

So that was the end of our golfing for this trip. Now, you may think we didn't have any fun at all on this one. But you'd be wrong. There's something about old friends, relatives and Army buddies getting away to do something, retell old stories, eat foods you normally wouldn't eat at home (or be allowed to eat), get up early or late -- whichever was your preference, hit some good shots, hit some bad shots, hit some more bad shots, and then drive home - recounting your exploits and talking politics. You know how it is -- and it doesn't get much better.

Trips like these reinforce that old Phyiils Diller line:

The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing.

Hooah