BOMB & GOUGE: Neither of us are thrilled with being away from home for two straight weeks, but if you're going to be away from home, few places are as exquisitely comfortable as CordeValle in San Martin, Calif. Associate Equipment Editor Max Adler has been here even longer, and while he's been charged with coordinating the endless minutiae of our annual Hot List Summit, he's as good a tour guide to the comforts away from home of this picture postcard place. He writes, "After the thirty-minute barrel south from San Jose airport, the exit off U.S. 101 seems at first a deliverance into John Steinbeck's 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath" -- straight roads lined with dust, heat and not much else. But all feelings of desperation reverse when you go through the front gate of CordeValle and a young man with a walkie-talkie knows your last name and your nostrils suddenly expand at the scent of grape. The Clos LaChance Vineyards border the golf course and there will be a bottle of their red waiting in your room whether you ask for it or not. And 'room' is a terrible understatement. Steinbeck himself would need a chapter to paint a vivid idea of the number nooks, robes, flat screen TV's, lotions, folded white towels and other surprises stocked in each 'room.' Migrant ranch worker shanties these are not.
"The arid foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains are a perfect place to hold a Hot List. When you're attempting to hit and thoroughly evaluate 3,000 pounds of golf clubs (so said our shipping bill from Yellow Freight) in under two weeks there's no time for a rain delay. As promised last March by the Director of Golf Travis Skeesick, our forecast is for nothing but sun, each icon shining like a coin on weather.com for the next ten days. In fact, the region is so dry that a forest fire ignited this past Fourth of July when lightning simply struck the ground. On the rolling hillside that provides the backdrop to our driving range, we can still see traces of the charred black earth. Lucky for everyone, firefighters halted the encroaching flames before they could come father down the valley and harm the course designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr.
"We've been chained to the driving range thus far, though some of us did sneak out for nine holes today. The roughly 500 members who belong here, and the resort guests who pony up the $400 greens fee, do get a real treat. The greens are fast and true, and the vista tee-shots encourage you to swing freely though the landing areas are tighter than they appear. In the first week of November, the UCLA Men's team will host its annual tournament here. When a top-shelf Division I program chooses a course 317 miles north of campus, you know the place has to be good."
The next couple of days will be filled with more of the amenities of CordeValle and meetings with our team of retailers, who will help our editors get a sense of the marketplace. More reports on their perspective to come...
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