August 2026 – First played Sunday River in Maine in the year of the Vid and just played again last week as part of a Northern New England golf trip celebrating my nephew’s 21st birthday. We played six courses, three I had played before – here, Sugarbush and Mt. Washington (in NH where we stayed on the second part of the trip and which is about an hour from Sunday River). Three I had not – Baker Hill, Spruce Peak (Stowe) and Stratton.
When we first played, conditioning was really tough. Conditioning was better this time – though still pretty spotty – but it was a five-hour round. Nothing ruins a round of golf more than slow play. Sure it’s easy to lose golf balls at Sunday River, but c’mon people! The MOST time a foursome should take is four hours for eighteen holes. I discuss slow and mopey play in my Oakland Hills review.
When not in disrepair or playing like you’ve got The Odyssey movie amount of time to kill, Sunday River is a quirky little RTJ design that goes over, through and around the mountainous terrain like you’re…well, like you’re in The Odyssey movie.
I’ll get to the course in a bit. First, let’s talk quirky. Many people – when they’re being nice – say my music taste is quirky. Unlike a lot of the Neanderthals I play with, who have one-dimensional music tastes, I like a variety of music which is why I like just shuffling my library on the course instead of just tuning into a Sirius or Apple music channel. Of course, those one dimensional music knuckleheads hate quirky: “This isn’t Van or Halen,” “Turn off this Loft bullshit,” or “Not one of the members in this band ever had their music play in a crappy Chevy or Coca Cola commercial.” Now no one is more one dimensional than my brother so there is no one I like to annoy more on the golf course with my quirky music than him. And joy of joys, I discovered my cousin Boozebag, gets even more annoyed at quirky tunes. He shot a 39 on the front (as a 14 handicap), and after a healthy dose of quirky, shot a smooth 50 on the back. Win!
I think the song that finally broke him was Clockwork Creep by Ten CC. Before I get to that, Ten CC is the perfect quirky band of whence I speak. They’re anything but boring. Sure they have hits too…here’s “I’m not in Love” from when I saw them last year at the Keswick near Philly:
What an awesome song and really interesting how they made it. Now the one-dimensional music fan might think, “Oh great Ten CC, they’re a cute little pop group from the 70’s/80’s.” Dig deeper into their catalog and you’ll find they are the very definition of quirky. However, this does not diminish from their impact on music. Did you know Eric Stewart from the group was originally in Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders who had the #1 US hit, The Game of Love? Then when Fontana went out on his own, Stewart took the lead and the Mindbenders shot to number one with Groovy Kind of Love.
Graham Gouldman, who was the only original member still in the band when I saw them, wrote some huge hits before forming Ten CC. You ever hear of the Yardbirds Heart Full of Soul and For Your Love? The Turtles Bus Stop? Yup all him. And Lol Creme and Kevin Godley went on after Ten CC to create, direct and produce some of music’s most pioneering and iconic music videos from bands like the Police and Peter Gabriel to probably the top or nearly top ranked video of all time, Herbie Hancock’s Rockit.
OK, which brings me to the all-time quirkiest, but enjoyable, songs of all time:
Ten CC Clockwork Creep. The song that broke cousin Gary.
XTC The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul. A band that is way underrated probably due to the fact they never toured because of Andy Partridge’s debilitating stage fright.
Frank Zappa Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow. Sure his entire catalog is quirky but we’ll settle on this one.
Of course no quirky list is complete without Primus and Winona’s Big Brown Beaver. One of the greatest videos ever!
Gentle Giant Knots. OK even this is a bit much for me but it’s in my library.
They Might Be Giants Birdhouse in your Soul. Another band who’s whole catalog could be considered quirky. Just saw them live within the past year or so. And should post the live video I have but…
Quirkiest remake: Devo Satisfaction.
And even some of the otherwise popular rock bands have put out their share of quirk. Here’s ZZ Top Manic Mechanic. RIP Frank Beard who passed away the day before I wrote all this.
How about Joe Walsh I.L.B.T.’s?
The Monkees had a bunch of quirk, copying the band after which they were created. Here’s Your Auntie Grizelda.
The aforementioned band after which the Monkees were created (The Beatles) had their share of quirk. Rocky Raccoon was a spoof song on Bob Dylan and American cowboy songs.
OK enough of that. If you made it this far after searching sites for a nice review of Sunday River, boy I bet you’re as annoyed as my brother and cousin right now. So to the course…
We’ll start at the clubhouse. Nice. Unassuming. However, do not under any circumstances order a hot dog at the turn. It’s not a traditional hot dog but a glowing, pink-colored piece of nuclear waste on a bun. Instead of meat-based hot dogs, they make red snapper dogs. That’s right, the fish. And no you can’t just have a regular hot dog because to these guys, this is a regular hot dog. Don’t.
Now I’ll go into a brief description and then post photos with sporadic captioning as my original photos were never saved and had to pull them from the scrapbook page so not sure which ones are which holes. That said, SR starts you off with a downhill, double blind par five. That’s right a blind drive to a blind approach. On this last trip I would hit three perfect shots and start my round with a par. Things would go steadily downhill from there. We played the white tees both times and these measure a hair under 6,000 yards and rate/slope to a 69.2/128 so not really rated hard which is surprisingly so as there are a ton of forced carries and tight corridors to navigate.
There are (as you would imagine) a lot of elevation changes and as mentioned earlier, forced carries. Nine stands out as you have a drive into a rollercoaster of a fairway then a good sized carry to an elevated green. The difference between the back tees and whites on ten is like a five minute cart drive and I am not exaggerating. It’s a full 130-yard difference but you need to wind down some switchbacks to get there. Nearly a third of the yardage difference from the blue to white tees are this hole and eight.
The threes were all really good and it’s a beautiful course with the mountains as a backdrop on every hole. There are no homes on the course to speak of and if conditioning and pace were better, this would likely crack my top 200.
To date this is the only course in Maine that I’ve played to date, and am really doing this review just to include the state on the directory page. By the way, if you like the routing map above, I scanned it from the back of the card from our 2020 round. It was pretty crappy. I then grabbed it from the scrapbook page and it was even crappier. I then used the WordPress AI tool to clean up. It did great except changed all of the hole numbers. So, I added the numbers I use on the Google maps which have rough edges and are of various sizes. Then I put them together and used ChatGPT to clean it up. I will be doing this moving forward instead of just laying the numbers I have on top of a Google Earth image as it really looks perfect for the blog.
From the tee box on one. And this is from the round where the conditioning was better.
This was where cousin Gary’s approach shot landed. I think when he hit it, it had a smiley face on it but that’s definitely a frown.
Here’s two – par four and number 10 handicap but again you see the brown tee boxes and since I didn’t bother to photoshop any of these, you will pretty much see the cart ahead of us on every hole.
Third hole. Great photo if I photoshopped out the shaggy brown areas. As is, nice short par four. It’s the #18 handicap and pretty sure I parred this both times I played.
I did clean up my photo of the par three fourth hole. You see this is a very pretty golf course.
The fifth from my drive.
Par three sixth hole. Avoid the bunkers.
The short par five seventh hole.
The eighth – as discussed above – gives you a huge break for the whites.
Here’s the approach on nine from the 2020 round.
Missed ten both times. Here is eleven 2020 so you can see how much worse conditioning was then versus now – even though now wasn’t great.
Eleven from our round last week.
I missed photos on a ton of holes on the back. The reason for that could’ve been the annoyance of the pace or that I was gonna sit the back out as I crushed my back on a bump in the cart on eight but I powered through. With the five-hour slog, I probably should have but would’ve been called a bunch of names for chickening out on the bets. And thank I God I stuck with it cause the delay and music was bugging Cousin Gary worse than me and he fell apart and I won most of my money back.
Sixteen and the last photo I took from my recent round. I’ll post the 2020 pix without captions.
I think you see, Sunday River offers a stunning backdrop for golf. It’s a shame about maintenance – and I don’t totally blame the crew for that; mountain courses are really tough to maintain. Sugarbush is another RTJ mountain course that I really like, but there too, maintenance is tough especially if there is or has recently been any rain. All in and if you’re doing a Mt. Washington trip (like we did) and want to play a variety of courses, this is better than the immediately close-by publics in NH. So I’d play Mt. Washington of course and give Sunday River a try. There’s a neat micro-brewery on the Sunday River access road that’s nice and the course is beautiful as long as you keep your expectations in check on conditioning and pace of play.
Golf Scrapbook 