Pebble Beach Golf Links

Nerves tend to run tight at the start of a round at Pebble Beach, what with the teeing area raised like a stage above the omnipresent gallery of Lodge guests, breakfast diners and tee-time-awaiters. From the first hole, the golfer quickly realizes that this is no typical West Coast resort course, tucked tightly between condos and designed within economics of scale. This course is larger than life, boasting mature stands of trees, roller coaster greens and bunkers in which you could easily hide one of the bigger sport utility vehicles. But it looks as if the course has taken a hundred years to develop this way and indeed it nearly has. The first 9-hole track was laid out along the cove in 1913.