Allison, though she didn't look it, was the single mother of a high school-age son. We had Allison and Keith, who between them covered the whole spectrum of coaching philosophy, from attitude adjustment to X's and O's.

But that's no longer true, if it ever was. One heard stories of clueless mother-son pairs, of guys right off the salmon boat. In the early days of Bandon Dunes it was sometimes said there weren't enough trained caddies to go around. The staff at Bandon Dunes is so numerous, so helpful and so friendly that it's a little startling at first-until you realize that these people aren't drugged, they're just genuinely nice. My brother and I were never lonely, though.

My brother said: 'This is the best experience I've ever had-except at nighttime.' (He was perhaps still basking in the afterglow of the day before, when he had blown my doors off at Bandon Dunes.) After finishing up at Pacific Dunes-which is to say, messing up on the par-3 17th, where the wind carried our tee shots perilously right, and then achieving partial redemption with bogeys on the par-5 18th-we ate beef-barbecue sandwiches outside the clubhouse and then just sat there on the Belgian-block patio with our beers, soaking up the late-afternoon sun and congratulating ourselves on our good luck. There was a brief frost delay our first morning but none the second, and we ended both our rounds in shirtsleeves. We had brought sweaters, turtlenecks and rainsuits but wound up using none of them. We left home in the snow, or the blackened, crusty aftermath of snow, traveled west and north for a day and found ourselves-miraculously-in golf weather: bright-blue sky, deep-blue ocean, just the hint of a breeze.

Bandon dunes best time to go