A bit of a change for me today - one of the benefits from volunteering at last year's Scottish Opens was a round of golf at the host course (the Renaissance Club), which I used today. In hindsight, it would have been nice to have been teeing off at 10 rather than 12:30 (very little wind this morning, changing to a reasonably strong north-easterly by early afternoon), but it was still a very enjoyable round of golf. One thing that came as a surprise was how much difference the tournament infrastructure makes to the look of the course - it's so much easier to pick lines when you have camera towers behind every green, and a couple of holes looked completely different without the stands in place. Today was the first time that I stood on the 10th tee (13th on the tournament layout - the organisers reorder the holes to have two loops of 9), and it's a very intimidating tee shot - this is the hole that runs along the coast, and you can't really see the fairway from the tee. Add in that wind into off the left, and it felt like I needed to be aiming almost out of play left to be hitting the fairway...
I ended up with 86 on the day, but it wasn't a day for scoring (with several par 4s into the wind being 3-shot holes, and the 170-yard 9th being a full 3-wood (which ended up short)) - definitely a course that I'd like to play again (which may come about through volunteering for this year's tournament, which I signed up for last week).