Golf Golf Course Open from April 1st – October 31st. For golf in New Mexico, this is one golf course you can’t miss. As you tee off on the first hole, a 150 – foot vertical drop welcomes you onto The Lodge golf course. And that’s just the beginning. At 9,000 feet above sea level, the terrain is as challenging as it is beautiful. Our golf course is one of North America’s oldest golf courses that will celebrate its 118th season in 2017. It was established in 1899. For its first 50 years the golf course was the highest golf in elevation in North America at 9,000 feet! There are three others that are now in the USA that top ours by less than 600 feet elevation, leaving ours still the 7th highest in the world! Governed by the Scottish tradition of playing different tees and separate flags on each hole. this dramatic nine – hole golf course, when played twice, becomes a challenging 18 – hole round. The golf course is open seven days a week, April through October. we recommend that you call ahead for tee times. ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** What's Your Hobby? Sometime back after I found out I couldn't do much of anything else I proclaimed writing as my hobby. I used to play golf but I can't do that any more and that's too bad because I had to quit golf just as my score was dropping down into a respectable venue. I mean, I guess I only had two games my score was in the seventies, maybe a seventy-seven and a seventy-nine. I mean if you can shoot in the low eighties with a shot at breaking eighty now and then, you can play with almost anyone. Well, I wasn't quite that good. I was more at home in the low eighties, with an occasional high ninety now and then, especially on a new or different golf course. Heck. Maybe I was just as at home in the high nighties category. I was good enough when I worked for one Fortune 500 Company they paid my dues at the second most prestigious golf club in the city. A city that sported six other clubs at the time.The first was the Country Club golf course. The one I played was Hillcrest, a long, tough course. If you could win at Hillcrest you could win anywhere in west Texas or eastern New Mexico, except maybe one course and it wasn't in eastern New Mexico I was in the mountains at Cloudcroft. Boy, that number one was a killer at Cloudcroft. What you did there is you walked out of this great big clubhouse that looked like a mansion or a palace over in England somewhere. Rode your cart to the number one tee. You looked ahead out toward the green and you couldn't see a green. You might see cloud or more often, space. When you hit on number one tee, your ball drops about a hundred and fifty yards down toward a very small green. The number one at Cloudcroft is not a confidence builder. But it's fun. I once went out to play golf at McCamey, Texas with my boss. He asked if I'd played golf before. Sure I said, before I moved out to this a, this , this little bit of heaven. We played nine holes. It was a nine hole course. The greens were not green at all but dirt, hard dirt and not exactly flat. You had to learn to play the hills and valleys on the dirt greens. All things considered I shot a fifty nine after I got over the shock of dirt greens. I liked golf. It was a good game. Most people always tried to play their partner. I didn't I always competed with the course. But wherever I found them those dogleg lefts cost me strokes. Golf is a physiological game. I once played a regular weekly game with this engineer. When we came to number eighteen we were tied. Now most golfers playing a friendly game, when you putted a ball and it stopped within the leather or say within fifteen inches of the hole. If he missed his shot I won and we had by now a fifteen dollars bet on the game. You didn't have to put that last shot, that was a "give me." Well we were tied and I waited on him to put. Instead he forced a rule in golf that states if you have a give me, your partner can request you put, you must forego the given and put. He said 'putt it." Now it was an easy putt but he had put a little pressure on me by insisting I putt it. I putted and missed. I had to pay up. I gave him a check for fifteen dollars. Shortly thereafter he left the company and went into consulting business, working for himself. About a year later I stopped by his office to see how he was doing and to shoot the breeze a minute. He was cleaning out his desk. I asked why, why, James? He said I've got an aggressive cancer. Doctors have given me thirty days. He pulled out this check I had written him over a year before. "Here, he said, 'I was going to give this back first time I ran into you. Keep it in my memory. I still have the check and I think of James sometime, now and then when I open my desk drawer. James was in his early forties. Let me change the subject. I stay in touch with my brother since our youngest brother died. I got an email from him Saturday morning and all he said was, "Green Bay and Atlanta are playing at seventy-thirty tonight, Ken. That's not uncommon for Ken. I could never write an eMail so spare. Of course I responded this morning. Hi, Ken, yes sir I saw where they were playing. Too many options. I watched Ken Burn’s, The Viet Nam War, the first of ten parts, eighteen hours, on PBS. I did look this morning to see that Atlanta won. Both Green Bay and Dallas lost. I guess if I was king of the hill, I would ban several activities. I would ban bull riding in American rodeos, bull fighting in Mexico and Spain, and Pro football in America. I would insist college football players when they graduated college would have to get a job and go to work like the rest of us. There wouldn’t be any pro sports. Everyone would have to work for a living. No motorcycle racing, no more greyhound races, no more winter Olympics or no more bicycle races where everybody cheats. Everybody would get a job and go to work. And if I lived in Houston, I’d definitely ban hurricanes in the Gulf or eastern Caribbean. Then I’d rest. By the way I saw where somebody said the other day, on Saturday they were driving fifty to go to a drive-in, a drive in movie. Can you beat that, Ken? "Yeah," he shot back, "beats golf."
I have a lot of hobbies starting with teaching Judo, helping people get healthy, building different things. A lot of transit hobbies these are thinks that I get interested in working at it till I get tired and then let it go.
I take it that your brother, Ken, is not a golf fan? I'm not a fan of any kind of sports with the exception of fishing. I do enjoy that especially when I catch the Big One.
Hobbies? Let's see.........powerboating, shooting, taking/editing photos and putting on USB's and watching PGA and NFL on tv.
Most definitely not. I tried to be a fisherman. Never did get the hang of it. Didn't know what I'd with one if I caught one except throw it back. That being the case, seemed a waste of time.
Good hobbies? I like the taking photos/editing and shooting. I quit the NFL last year. I'm more of a college football fan and don't usually get to watch the games but get a score on line. I watch little television. We just have one tv and the wife gets first preference. Anyway it doesn't matter what I hobby I like. We all pick our own.
Building things. Anything. Built our own home outside of Phoenix, think you've seen it earlier. Working model 1/8 scale steam locomotive. Also fixing things, anything, sometimes even stuff that is not "broke"! Frank
I've caught bigger but it's been a long time. I'd trade this one for a good ham&cheese with maybe a cool one to chase it.
Completely forgot about fishing, but it has to be freshwater fishing, not saltwater. Funny, when we arrived here in Jacksonville in Jan. 2009, we decided to get my wife a saltwater rod/reel for her birthday and then we got me one a little later. Bought a tackle box and some tackle. At the time we didn't have a boat, so we got involved with a club that done ocean fishing from local pier. Didn't do the pier fishing either, but, during one of the raffles, I won a nice saltwater reel/rod. When we did, a few months, buy a boat, I ordered and installed three rod holders on the boat. Now, the wild part about this, we never once used any of the saltwater stuff and I took the rod holders off of the boat. Last year, we sold, and gave away, all of our saltwater fishing stuff, except for the rod holders. BUT, we still have all of our freshwater fishing equipment from when we lived in Colorado. There, we caught our share of Rainbow Trout and a few Brown Trout. Looking forward to doing the same again.
Every time we did off show sailing we were dragging a line behind the boat with a fake squid. We always had more mahi-mahi or dorado than we could ever eat. We gave them away to other boaters.
Two other things I like to do, and one of them I haven't done since high school. First, model building. My cousin loved to build model cars and I got into it as well. He had a lot, whereas I only had a few. So, now, 2019, I have a model of the first Navy Destroyer (U.S.S. Charles F Adams Guided Missile Class) that I served on and went on my first Westpac Cruise on, a Corsair F-4U-4 Fighter Plane and a Navy F/A 18-E Super Hornet Fighter Jet. The Corsair and Super Hornet was my wife's son, that he never got to, before he passed at 15 years old. I will be darn PROUD to do both in remembrance of him. He would have made me a great step-son. Other, somewhat of a hobby, is flying my Army Missile-Launching remote control mini-helicopter around our living room. And, I've got really good at taking off, flying and landing it. Wow, I'll be 70 in a few months and I'm doing this stuff.