Noordwijkse Golf Club
I have no idea how to pronounce this and know we butchered it while there.
Here’s where my golf course ranking goes way off the rails versus professional ones. Noordwijkse is located in the Netherlands outside of Amsterdam, “hard on the North Sea.” I don’t know what that expression means but it just seemed to fit. You just can’t find this place – our cab driver reached the address and gave one of those ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ as the only visible indication that something was there was a slightly wider than a “bike path” path through the woods. After driving around Noordwijk for a while we came back and said “WTF let’s go for it.” We drove down the path for about a half mile or so and all of a sudden you come upon the course. For a guy from the Northeast US, all of this is a pretty cool experience and adds points to my ranking.
This course does not get a lot of play outside its members and when we came in and said we needed to rent clubs they had to actually scrape together members’ sets for us to use. The fact that few Yanks ever play here adds “exclusivity” points to my ranking.
Noordwijkse is a links course but meanders into the woods for a half dozen or so holes. Ranking critics take points off for this. Why? This adds uniqueness. You get a links and parkland feel making the holes unique and you have to play the wind game, then dodge the trees, then back to a ground game. Another underrated course, Tenby in Wales, combines some parkland holes with the links and Bandon Trails does an awesome job with this, too.
So all of this adds to the high ranking I give Noordwijkse but what sends it over the top and into the top ten is the experience and members. We got to the club right off the red eye from Philly. Besides setting us up with members clubs, the staff got us to the lockers for our luggage (not much more than a high school gym’s lockers BTW) then got us what we needed to shower. We ordered screwdrivers with breakfast and since we didn’t speak Flemish (or whatever language they were speaking) we had to describe what a screwdriver was. Before the round we chatted up the GM and the members. The entire group was so proud of their course and really wanted to know what we thought of it after our round (and how the hell we found it). Everyone should feel the same pride in their home course.
So after nine rainy holes, we made it back to the clubhouse and decided to grab some “walkers.” So we order a six pack of walkers and the bartender starts opening them. We’re like, “No no, we want to take them out on the course.” Walkers were a foreign concept to him. So he looks over to the GM for approval who yells across the bar, “Let the Americans do what they want.”
I went to Amsterdam/Noordwijkse in 2015 with a couple of high school buddies as part of our 50th birthday celebration. Here’s how lame I am. So we’re celebrating reaching our half century milestone in sin city – a city that makes even Las Vegas blush. So what do I do? I ask my buddies if I can fly my daughter and her friend up from Rome to join us for the weekend. Here’s how lame they are, they said yes. Despite this, I recommend Amsterdam. Fun city. For eats I recommend Cau Steakhouse or for more of a local flavor try De Roode Leeuw which is right on the Dam Square. It’s a hotel and restaurant.
Since we were there with my daughter and her friend we did do the touristy stuff in Amsterdam, including the Anne Frank house. There was a brutal line to get in but as we had a couple of “waiters” we were able to find the closest bar and pre-game and wait for them to text us that we were next in line. Pretty sobering place so I recommend un-sobering before you go there.
Finally, we also shot down to Brussels during our trip here. Of course this is Beer Nirvana for beer nerds and we go to a bar there and my buddies are taste-testing like 20 different Belgian beers and generally sucking up my beer-drinking time. Finally when the bartender gets to me, I ask him, of course, if he has Miller Lite. He gives me the same snooty look as the maitre d’ from the French Restaurant in Ferris Bueller and says, “No, we do not have the Miller Lite.” So I says to the bitch, “Do you have anything that tastes like Miller Lite?” He shot back, “Well I can piss in a glass for you.” Two points for the snooty bartender on that comeback.
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