'How I Spend My Summer Vacation'

SUTTONS BAY, Mich. -- No one would ever confuse the winding little driveway through the cherry orchard with Magnolia Lane or the golf course beyond it with Augusta National, but for some of us, the first trip down the road to the Leelanau Club each summer has a similar power to summon memories and trigger anticipation. Carved into the sandy hillsides of the Leelanau Peninsula -- the "little finger" of Michigan's mitten -- the public track meanders through pine forests and provides an occasional peek at the waters of Grand Traverse Bay.

Most of all, it offers a warm "welcome home" for golfers who return each year with their families for a few idyllic weeks in the north woods. The welcome even has a voice. "Hey, the boys are back!" bellows the starter, a man with the sound of a cement mixer and the thick trunk of a pulling guard, the kind of guy you'd call "Coach," even if you couldn't read his name tag. "If you hustle," says Coach, "I can get you out on No. 10, and you'll have clear sailing."

There are fine resort courses all around -- Bay Harbor, Arcadia Bluffs, The Bear at Grand Traverse Resort -- and they're great fun to play, despite a bit too much glitz in their clubhouses and the demand for a little too much plastic in the golf shop. The Leelanau Club at Bahle Farms (its official name) has no such pretensions. Although it's pretty well kept for a mom-and-pop operation, it's not exactly manicured. The clubhouse has only half a dozen tables, and the golf shop? Well, it's slightly larger than a walk-in closet.

What it does have is this: a very friendly staff and some just plain beautiful holes. The view from the tee on No. 2 is forever etched in my memory: 100 feet or so straight down to a generous fairway that climbs slowly past a pine stand to a sloping, two-tiered green with only the endless horizon beyond. Or No. 4: 202 yards over a pond from the back of another sharply elevated tee. Or No. 13: a wide-open par 4 flanked on the left by an orchard (tart, sweet, or Queen Anne cherries, depending on the month) where I often have to retrieve Mark, my juice-stained, Marathon Man partner. So it goes, until the 18th, a dogleg left, then uphill to an almost blind pin, a great hole to decide a close match.

My only (admitted) character flaw is that I join too many golf clubs. The list, happily, includes a couple of legendary ones. But sometimes a golf course is not about lofty Stimps and glen-plaid fairways. Sometimes it's about a friendly nassau for a sleeve ("one-ball press, anytime"), the centerpiece of a lazy afternoon followed by a lakeside family cookout (barbecue ribs with Carol's cherry sauce) or a drive down to the Interlochen Arts Camp to catch a big-name act or, better yet, some of the finest young musicians in the world. Sometimes, it's just a high tee with a hundred-mile view -- the essence of summer -- and a picture in your head that lasts the whole winter.

RICHARD SMITH IS CHAIRMAN OF NEWSWEEK.

The Leelanau Club at Bahle Farms, not rated, $49-$75, leelanauclub.com, 877-533-5262.

SALEM, ORE. -- As a genetic Norwegian and born-and-raised Oregonian, trapped for two decades in Manhattan until absurdly buying a farm near Nashville, I have a simple recipe for summer golf: anywhere but Tennessee, where from Memorial Day to Labor Day, if not longer, it's so hot and humid you could, without air conditioning, die in the living room. Though I abhor playing out of a cart, it beats being parboiled and then drowned in a pool of your own sweat. So my thoughts turn back to the Beaver State, whose climate seemed cruel to a native son -- it rained constantly, I claimed, from Halloween to Easter -- but at this time of year boasts unbeatable golf weather: dry, sunny, low 80s.

Everybody knows about Bandon Dunes, and they're right to consider it possibly the finest destination golf in the country. Fewer know about Pumpkin Ridge, near Portland, where Tiger Woods won his third U.S. Amateur, and whose two 18s by Bob Cupp are of the same exacting standard as his magnificent Crosswater over the Cascades around Bend. But for me, going home means Salem, about 40 miles south of Portland, and that in turn means Salem Golf Club, where I wish I'd been a member as a kid. Pat Fitzsimons was, and before Fred Couples turned up in Seattle, Fitzsimons defined the game in the Northwest; his scorecard for a 58 is framed in the clubhouse. This place feels like golf ought to: democratic, affordable and lovely, with the first and 10th tees, neatly hedged and planted, lying just off the restaurant's veranda, the fairways seemingly sculpted out of massive stands of fir and oak that can gobble balls and help perfect your low, running punch-outs. It was completed in 1928 by Ercel Kay, a noted amateur whose family owns it still, and is a distillation of the Willamette Valley landscape, close enough to the river to flood occasionally.

In summer it plays fast and even shorter than the 6,230 yards from the back tees, with five reachable par 5s, but it defends par well with tree trouble everywhere; on the dogleg-right 11th, a long drive that doesn't cut will end up in an old apple orchard that can also catch slices on the fourth and hooks on the seventh. It's fun -- and achingly beautiful -- all the way around, and my nonplaying wife loves to walk it. If you're lucky, a train will blow by on the closing hole, and otherwise you can just look at the osprey nests, then take a table outside for the best food and view in the capital city, washing it down with a local pinot noir. Last year, a Tennessee friend passing through in August was so entranced that he wondered about summer rentals (and said he'd never had a better steak). With a great range right down the tracks, you can spend all day here and watch night fall over fairways that beg for play in these ideal conditions.

GARY FISKETJON IS VICE PRESIDENT AND EDITOR AT LARGE OF ALFRED A. KNOPF.

Salem Golf Club, ★ ★ ★ ★, $50, salemgolfclub.com, 503-363-6652.

EAST LOTHIAN, SCOTLAND -- Golf in summer presents me with a major problem: the avoidance of heat. I hanker for the prospect of fresh, cool air, even on a sunny day, and so that need leads me inexorably to Scotland, to the seaside, to a links. I've played on a lot of the links around East Lothian and Fife, but my favorite is Gullane No. 1, about half an hour by car due east of Edinburgh.

I first caddied on this course as a child (for my father) and later came to play it many times. There are many delightful links on this, the southern shore of the Firth of Forth -- Longniddry, Kilspindie, Gullane and North Berwick, for example -- and it's hard to choose among them, offering as they do the generic pleasures and trials of golf by the sea in Scotland. Gullane (pronounced "gullen") is typical. Level, narrow fairways, few trees, a club-trapping rough of longish, hardy, wind-combed grass and patches of impenetrable gorse and whin. Beyond the golf course's edge lie wide, sandy beaches set in shallow bays.

Gullane seems slightly more elevated than the others somehow, if only because of the spectacular views from the seventh tee (the 398-yard Queen's Head). On a clear day, the panorama is spectacular: You can see north across the wide mouth of the Firth of Forth to Fife, some 10 miles distant, to Kirkcaldy and Leven and East Wemyss, and due west gives you a distant prospect of Edinburgh.

No doubt there will be a stiffish breeze, off the Firth, keeping the clouds scudding by briskly, the temperature down and requiring you to hone your golf skills -- such as they are -- to cope with the particular challenges of a links: hitting the ball with as low a trajectory as you can muster, constantly resorting to pitch-and-run, trying to avoid the deep bunkers with their fearsome cliff-edge faces and hoping to negotiate the huge greens with their baffling, undulating contours.

Gullane Golf Club was founded in 1882 -- the year Virginia Woolf was born and Robert Ford assassinated Jesse James, as it happens -- and the No. 1 course (there are two others, almost as venerable) is highly regarded. It's an extra frisson to play Gullane imagining those 19th-century golfers attempting the same holes as you are, but, in fact, records show that golf has been played on these East Lothian links for more than 300 years. The golf ghosts are older than you think.

WILLIAM BOYD IS A LONDON-BASED AUTHOR AND SCREENWRITER WHOSE MOST RECENT NOVEL IS RESTLESS.

Gullane G.C. (No. 1), ranked 20th in Scotland according to Golf Digest's Planet Golf, $125-$147, gullanegolfclub.com, 011-44-1-620-842-255.