We baby boomers are an odd bunch.  Almost half of us -– 46% actually –- say one of our top reasons to choose a specific retirement location is to be near our children.  Fair enough, but a larger number of us say that climate and recreation activities are important, 60% and 61% respectively.  (The top decision driver on where to retire is cost of living, at 81%.)  The source of this data was a recent annual survey by the Del Webb organization as reported in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.

        My conversations with residents and real estate professionals

Small regional airports have convenient access, meaning you can arrive a little later than at major airports.

in the more than 150 golf communities I have visited generally confirm the Del Webb data.  Retirees who love golf of course also love their children (and grandchildren), and they have found a way to indulge both passions by locating to a golf community within an hour of a major airport.

        From Virginia to Florida, private communities are within an easy drive of flights to virtually everywhere, many of them nonstop and the rest no more than one stop.  Even if your child has decided to follow her dream to be an actress by joining a Sioux Falls, SD, theater troupe, you can be there for the standing ovation in about five hours if you live, for example, at Governor’s Club in Chapel Hill, the Peninsula Club on Lake Norman in North Carolina or the Dominion Club in Haymarket, VA.  All these fine communities are within 35 minutes of a major international airport.  We could add dozens of other good choices to the list.  (If you want some specific suggestions about communities near airports, contact me.)

        If you can spare an extra hour or two for your flight, smaller regional airports are a good option as well; parking and access to your gate is generally a lot easier at smaller airports, which saves time.  Leaving from Myrtle Beach, you can be in Sioux Falls, for example, in about six hours.  The under-rated Wachesaw Plantation, with its fine Tom Fazio layout, is less than a half hour from Myrtle Beach International.  From Savannah’s airport, the flight to Sioux Falls is well under six hours, and the golf-rich Landings community on Skidaway Island, with its six excellent courses, is just 45 minutes from that convenient regional airport.  Hendersonville, NC’s Champion Hills, another Fazio course community, is a mere half hour from the small Asheville airport, yet a flight on Delta from Asheville would have you in Sioux Falls in under five hours, with one stop.

        Dozens of excellent golf communities are within minutes of southern golf communities, well positioned to help you get over your separation anxiety and get on with your life.

DominionValleybehindgreen

Haymarket, VA's Dominion Valley is within 45 minutes of Dulles airport.

        I had forgotten how pretty it is on and around the golf course at Heritage Plantation in Pawleys Island, SC.  Live oak trees are to the Low Country of South Carolina as lights are to Paris or skyscrapers are to New York City, and Heritage has these 200- and 300-year old gnarly monsters in profusion.  They are beautiful to look at but horrible to work the golf ball around.

        The design of the circa 1986 Heritage, which is a mile west of Highway 17, the main coastal route through the Carolinas, is often credited to Larry Young, but as one long-time resident of Pawleys Island said, “Trust me, Larry must have had a lot of help.”  Indeed, the guiding hand for Heritage was the prolific Dan Maples, but the inspiration for the golf community came from Young, a developer who was instrumental in helping to put Myrtle Beach on the map as a premier golfing destination.

HeritagePar3overwater

Even the par threes at Heritage look like doglegs to the right, although the play is directly over the water to the green beyond.

 

        A bit overleveraged even before the latest recession hit, Young is no longer a major player on the Myrtle Beach golfing scene, but Heritage is a fine legacy for him.  He took great care to keep housing and golf as separate as practical.  You cannot imagine a single live oak having given its life for the sake of the layout, and that could explain the profusion of doglegs around the trees, most of them to the right.  In retrospect, I cannot recall many out of bounds stakes, but I did spray the ball beyond the immediate field of play a few times.  It was tough to find any alleyways toward the green once you were in those trees.

        The putting greens at Heritage are generally enormous and multi-tiered, which makes placement of tee shots important, the more so because the doglegged two and three shotters outnumber the straight ones.  Our threesome, not the straightest hitting group, found very few sand bunkers during our round.  The bunkers that guard the putting surfaces, big and steeped, were more problematical than the fairway bunkers, which played their parts more as framimg than hazard.  The dogleg holes featured sharp angles, almost all favoring a fade, and it was tempting to skirt the trees at the crook of the leg to avoid long approach shots from the elbows.  Three times I had putts of more than 50 feet.

        All those trees tend to affect air circulation, and Heritage’s turf conditions were not quite at peak form yet, or as good as some of the other courses in the immediate area, like the widely praised Caledonia Golf & Fish Club, True Blue  (both designed by Mike Strantz) and Pawleys Plantation, a Jack Nicklaus Signature course.  The greens looked a little “furry” but were deceptively fast.  On one of the largest, I hit to the top level, well above the pin just eight feet below the crest of the green.  I ran my putt along the ridge, stopped it just at the top, and watched it roll 10 feet past.  The greens were fast enough for me.

        Heritage is a gated community just eight miles north of Georgetown, SC, and about 35 minutes from Myrtle Beach International Airport.  Single-family homes range in price from the $200s to over $1 million with views across the marsh.  The semi-private club is open to the public but offers memberships as well.  Using the Myrtle Beach Golf Passport, a $39 discount card that is available to second-home owners and full-time residents in the Myrtle Beach area, my green fees were just $60, which included not only a cart, but also two drinks and lunch.  The “rack rate” for Heritage during the current “high” season is $125.

HeritageLiveOak

Live oak trees dominate the scene at Heritage Plantation.