golf & spa
links and luxury
By George Fuller
My wife Landry and I are different. On vacation, we both enjoy golf, but she’d much rather play a quick seven holes and then beat a fast retreat into an orange-scented spa somewhere for a mango-papaya body polish or a massage. Sometimes she’ll skip golf altogether to get straight to the good stuff, like a kid who passes on the Brussels sprouts to get to the ice cream.
Me? I’m playing 18 holes100 (plus or minus) strokes of sheer frustration and occasional success.
She’s smart. I’m a guy.
This scenario plays out every day, I’m sure, in probably every hotel room in the world. We know it does here in Monterey County.
Pebble Beach, for example, with its array of golf courses to tempt guys like me, also offers a potpourri of spa treatments for smart women like Landry. That’s not to say that smart women don’t also enjoy the golf courses, but what makes them smart is that they will play one day and make a beeline to the spa the next, if not that same afternoon.
So while I’m hacking foliage with my wedge at Spyglass, The Spa at Pebble Beach will be pampering Landry with a Swiss crème body wrap or a rose geranium scrub. I’m welcome at the spa, too, for some post-golf therapy on my forearms, neck, lower back and hips.
Later, over at the lovely Monterey Plaza Hotel on Cannery Row, Landry can indulge in a warm marine mud treatment at the spa as I freeze my toosh off in the morning fog on the Pacific Grove Municipal golf course. She might follow up with a sea mineral exfoliation, something I’d be getting the natural way out on hole 15.
In Carmel, A Signature Day Spa will concoct a Champagne and rose butter cream scrub for the apple of my eye, and Spa on the Plaza in Monterey will stage a four-hands Ayurvedic massage. This last affair takes an hour and a half, just enough time for me to lose a couple sleeves of Precepts on the front nine at Bayonet.
Spa directors are like chefs for the flesh. They use local ingredients (roses, seaweed, pumpkins), cook up elaborate schemes to tempt and please (wraps, polishes, cocoons and massages) and offer it all on a tantalizing menu.
Spas, I’ve come to discover, are quite civilized places. Golf courses, by comparison, are not. On golf courses, you get sweaty, dirty and irritated. Your playing partners will empty your wallet for you and laugh about it gleefully. Golf is like an artichoke facial with the thorns left on. Not only is it painful, it leaves deep scars.
Spas do the opposite. If I wanted to do the smart thinga concept that generally escapes golfers altogetherI’d join Landry in the spa. My golf game might still stink, but my skin would smell like roses…or pomegranates…or papaya…
