By Ron Whitten May 2006

I've walked Alabama's Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, sampled Louisiana's Audubon Golf Trail, and even explored the Lewis & Clark Golf Trail in North Dakota.

Each was worth the effort, offering good and sometimes great golf.

Golf trails—marketing alliances uniting courses that would otherwise be competitors—are perfect for a restless golfer like me. I don't want to play the same resort course three or four times. I want to keep moving, to see what fairways lie beyond the next horizon. (As Golf Digest's architecture editor, I've played more than 1,000 courses over the past two decades.) On top of that, the best trails offer package deals and accommodations.

But they aren't perfect. Some can be too confining, like the Finger Lakes Golf Trail in New York, which offers just four courses. Others are too indiscriminate, like the I-95 Golf Trail, boasting 2,000 courses within 100 miles of Interstate 95 from Maine to Florida. And every golf trail, because it is prepackaged, eliminates the element of surprise, the thrill of discovery, the spontaneity of genuine choice.

So the idea was to blaze my own golf trail, using the recommendations of real golfers from Golf Digest's latest Best Places to Play. As the game's most comprehensive guide, it was the perfect starting point, especially now that the course listings are organized by major city instead of just alphabetically.

I decided to make my way through the central highlands of Florida, the state's hill country of horse ranches and cattle farms. That's the real Florida, the inland one—far removed, I thought, from plastic pink flamingos and the purple hairdos who plant them (although I would soon discover there's no escaping either in a state where, despite being a senior citizen myself, an awful lot of residents call me "young fella.") I took out a road atlas and plotted a general course. I would start somewhere around Tampa and wander northeast to Jacksonville, taking five days to play five courses. This section of Florida is full of destinations, like Westin Innisbrook, World Woods, El Diablo and TPC at Sawgrass. I'd played all those fabulous layouts. I wanted new adventures, so I targeted the second tier of courses, those with and ratings. With plenty of those across the state, I browsed readers' comments in Best Places to Play to help decide my route. I also scanned the range of green fees, figuring I'd try a beer-and-pretzels budget, then splurge on one champagne round at the end.

Because any trail should include more than just golf, I vowed to do some impromptu off-road exploration. I wound up intersecting with several bits of military history, so I call this my Military Trail, one far different from the highway of the same name running from Boca Raton to North Palm Beach. The only thing my trail would have in common with golf on that glittery gold coast is that, like everywhere in Florida, carts are mandatory.

I started my journey in Weeki Wachee, north of St. Petersburg on coastal Highway 19 where, according to billboards, mermaids have been swimming their tails off since 1947. Alas, it was January and shows were closed for the season, despite the fact that the water remains a balmy 72 degrees year-round. I was crushed, and concluded there was no point looking for a pyramid of water-skiers either.

I headed back up Highway 19 for my first round, at The Dunes Golfers Club, now carrying from Golf Digest readers. Designed by Arthur Hills, it opened in 1988 as Seville Golf & Country Club. As a proposed bedroom community to Tampa-St. Pete 45 miles south, Seville's real-estate component never really took off, although the recent completion of the Suncoast Parkway, a tollway direct from Tampa, could change that. Still, the club has undergone financial hardships, different owners and the name change. Today, the hard times are reflected mainly in its rudimentary clubhouse, which is mostly just a screened-in porch.

I joined another walk-on, Bob from New York City, a guy my age down to visit his retired father. The starter had us, as a twosome, follow a foursome of middle-age couples. On the par-5 first hole, we both hit our second shots to within wedges of the green, then waited for the group ahead to putt out. As they replaced the flag, I was astonished to see Bob hit right into them, nearly beaning one of the wives. Her husband started running toward us, screaming so loudly that the starter zoomed down from the first tee to see if he'd have to break up a fight.

"Sorry," Bob shouted back, "I thought you'd walk off the back of the green."

"Our carts are at the front of the green, you nitwit!" the guy replied, or words to that effect.

During the commotion, my only thought was, Great. There goes any chance of them letting us play through. They didn't.

Which was OK, actually, because it gave me time to absorb the exceptional course design. The Dunes flows naturally across pine-covered sand dunes, with only teaspoons of earth moved to form knobs and bunkers. The greens emerge subtly from the landscape, several backdropped by hillside sand scars and blowouts, some of them bomb craters (the site was a World War II practice range for pilots). Instead of traditional rough, there's pine straw scattered over a sandy base, as you'd find in North Carolina, and it didn't take long for me to conclude that The Dunes is Florida's version of Pinehurst No. 2.

Just ? Well, the tees are badly in need of leveling, the carts seemed ancient, and there is that clubhouse. But the course design alone deserves at least one more star from readers in Best Places to Play.

My next stop was due east of Brooksville, at Sherman Hills Golf Club, whose rating also seems a bit low. This 18 is a low-budget microcosm of the 36 holes offered at World Woods on the other side of town. Sherman's front nine was artfully carved from pastureland, accented by long waste areas of native sand and huge landscaped mounds that screen out I-75 along the sixth and seventh holes. The back nine plays through several oak groves, with an umbrella-shape oak in the 11th fairway and several more specimens framing the 17th green. Sherman Hills finishes with a flourish, a 594-yard hole that plays over a man-made hill, then down to a peninsula green surrounded by a pond.

If there's a certain Fazio flair to some of the holes at Sherman Hills, it's because its designer, Ted McAnlis, once built courses for George and Tom Fazio, after McAnlis quit his job as a rocket engineer for NASA. Sad to say, McAnlis is no longer designing courses. He's in federal prison, convicted on multiple counts of income-tax evasion, the waste of a good deal of talent.

North of Sherman Hills, in the little town of Bushnell, I came upon tiny Dade Battlefield Historic State Park. It's the Little Big Horn of Florida, for on that site back in late December 1835, Seminole warriors ambushed a column of U.S. soldiers who had been sent to round them up and force them west to the Oklahoma Territories. (It took seven years before the Seminoles were finally captured and moved.) Every December since 1981, townspeople have re-enacted the massacre in an area just south of the battlefield, using rifles and uniforms that are far more authentic than the typical Civil War re-enactment, park ranger Chuck Wicks told me. They've even constructed a spectator mound to accommodate the crowd that watches the spectacle.

Driving along the back roads, through burgs like Okahumpka, it struck me that the federal government ran off the Seminoles to make room for what would eventually become the world's largest trailer park. OK, real-estate agents call them modular homes, but basically they're double-wides, permanent descendants of what tour books of the 1950s called "tin-can tourists." Mobile homes seem to be the most common abode in central Florida, tucked beneath ancient live oaks, cantilevered over sink-hole ponds, and lining fairways on residential golf courses from Brooksville to Leesburg to Lady Lake.

The fanciest operation I came upon was The Villages, an enormous retirement-home community that features 20 nine-hole executive courses that residents play for free and eight full-size courses available at nominal prices. In fairness, only The Villages' original golf developments, east of Highway 441, are strictly trailer park. The overflow west, developed over the past 15 years, features larger homes of sturdy cinder-block construction covered with stucco. That they mostly look alike causes me to lump them with the less-expensive alternative.