

Enjoy The Freedom of Independent Travel to Scotland Golf Courses
When you are not tied to a tour’s itinerary you have the freedom to decide: Where you play, When you play, How much you play, Who you play with, and What you do after you play.
Tour-packaged golfers are bussed to the same, over-crowded courses that all tours patronize. Independent Golfers play lesser-known and much less crowded but equally spectacular golf courses. If they enjoy themselves on a Scotland golf course they can stay for another eighteen instead of climbing back aboard the bus with the other tour members.
Independent Golfers can follow a morning round with lunch, perhaps a steak pie or fish and chips in a local pub, and then drive 45 minutes over an extraordinarily scenic road that winds through mountains, forests and fields to play a different but equally challenging Scotland golf course in the afternoon.
Independent golfers avoid crowded tourist hotels and stay at small hotels or comfortable bed and breakfast establishments where they can chat with the owners over an evening cup of tea or wander down the road to the local pub instead of spending all their waking hours in the company of the same fellow tour members.
The Independent Golfer's Guide tells stories of golfers who traveled independently (not on a packaged tour) in Scotland. Reading about their travels will prepare you to enjoy the same kinds of experiences.
To look closer at the book,
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What Tours Can Offer
Tours are perfectly fine for some people. Tour operators are happy to bus you to a selected number of well-known Scotland golf courses, bundle you with fellow tourists from Milwaukee or Houston onto the tees and into the hotels, perhaps spice the vacation up with an evening floorshow of bagpipe playing and/or a tour of a whiskey distillery, charge you handsomely, and claim to have given you an “experience of the golfing lifetime in Scotland.” If this is what you are looking for than go to a travel agent, find a tour, pay your money, and enjoy.
But the REAL "Golfing Experience of a Lifetime" Can Be Much Richer
If you join such a tour you will never play golf with a Scot. You won’t be invited down to the local pub for a pub lunch and a pint of lager or a “bump of the bog water.” You won’t sit and talk golf into the wee hours with locals whose great- great- grandparents knew every bunker, swale and fairway bump of the golf course you just played that afternoon.
Also, if you join a tour you will never get to play some of the most fabulous but lessor-know Scotland golf courses. Tours don't go there because Americans don't know that these courses exist.
If you're on a tour you won’t be able to stand on an elevated tee and gaze across grass-tufted dunes toward the sea with a view that is uncluttered by busy foursomes working their way in lock step around the golf course in front of you. You won’t be able to return the next day to that course that baffled you so, this time to test your suspicion that a drive down the left side of the fairway on the third hole is the real way to come into the green with a doable approach. In short, that expensive golf package tour will let you play a few well-known courses without giving you the opportunity to experience the true Scotland golf.
Take Charge of Your Scotland Golf Vacation and Enjoy
On the other hand , if for you the golf experience must include wild and wonderful scenery not overrun by tourists, if the need to meet different shot requirements for each hole defines an important quality of the golf courses you like to play, if the history and traditions of the game are never far from your mind, if golf for you is the challenge of selecting between two shots, one with greater potential reward but also greater risk, if all this is more important than having somebody carry your clubs for you from the bus to the clubhouse, then you are at heart an Independent Golfer and playing golf independently in Scotland is something you cannot miss in this life.

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