GolfIllinois.com: Escape from the City Life

With the new GolfIllinois.com teeing off this week, we invite you to check out Kenneth W. Lewis III's review of the Glynns Creek Golf Club in Long Grove, Iowa. Located just minutes west of the mighty Mississippi River, a player-friendly layout that offers golfers of every skill level a chance to succeed by providing five separate tee boxes on each hole. Since Glynns Creek's opening in 1992, the course has become a huge favorite with golfers in both Iowa and Illinois, and it's easy to understand why. With the tranquility, peacefulness, and beauty unique to the heartland, the course offers golfers a respite from the busy city life. The course is known as nature's playground, with many deer known to scamper about on the scenic back nine.

GolfCalifornia.com:
Something for Everyone in the Family

Summer in Tahoe is a sight to behold, as staff writer Doug Saunders illustrates in his review of Northstar at Tahoe, a complete resort featuring the largest mountain bike complex in Northern California, 10 tennis courts, an adventure park, riding stables, ATV Tours, a private fly fishing lake, and, of course, golf. Designed by Robert Muir Graves, the golf course plays quite different on the front and back nine. Look for wide open fairways on the front nine and tight corridors on the back nine. Come prepared for just about anything. "This golf course is a true resort course and the pace of play is directly related to who is out on the course," Saunders writes. "Some days you can breeze around Northstar in less than four hours while other days you have the time to count the different varieties of birds that are flittering through the trees."

TravelGolf.com: Ogio O-Zone YZ Golf Bag

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In this week’s spotlight product review, senior writer Kiel Christianson checks out the Ogio O-Zone YZ Golf Bag, a unique, functional and fun stand bag targeted at young players. At just 5.75 pounds and equipped with a wide array of bells and whistles, the O-Zone YZ is a well-engineered, indispensable accessory for any style-conscious golfer. Christianson says the most unique aspect of the bag, and the most appealing, is the kidney-shaped club bay, complete with five fully-separated compartments and Ogio’s exclusive Putter Pit™, designed specifically for your precious flat stick. Our reviewer was also impressed with the bag’s strap: “Of paramount importance to walkers, the O-Zone’s extremely rugged Crossbow™ strap looks like it would hold a small imported car securely, and it’s comfortable and easy to adjust as well.” The bag retails for approximately $170. For more information, visit www.ogio.com.

GolfFlorida.com: Arthur Hill Does it Again

North Port is a tiny town, still under development, located 25 miles south of Sarasota. As senior writer Joe Bruno explains, homes and golf course communities are sprouting up all over the area. For this week's featured GolfFlorida.com review, Bruno headed out to play the Heron Creek Golf Course, which is part of the community of the same name. "(Heron Creek) is an 18-hole Arthur Hill designed course that will stun you with its beauty and sometimes break your heart with its level of difficulty," Bruno writes. "The fairways are hilly and dotted with huge sand traps on several of the holes." For the true duffer who yearns to be challenged, Bruno says you won't find a better test than the fairways at Heron Creek.

TravelGolf.com: Jamaica's Newest Golf Course

In our effort to cover the world's best courses, we asked staff writer David Stone review for a review of the Jamaica's newest golf course - the Ritz-Carlton's White Witch in Montego Bay (surely not one of David's tougher assignments). Rumor has it that the course may be haunted, and our reviewer is a believer after playing the difficult but manageable layout. "With its dramatic elevation changes, hairpin turns, swirling mountain winds, and panoramic views of the Caribbean (16 of 18 holes have sea views), the Robert Von Hagge-designed Witch is a delight, so long as you aren't intimidated by the course's layout and quirks," Stone writes. Sounds like you may want to bring a few extra balls in case you send a few over the cliffs, into heavy vegetation, or the bottom of the beautiful ponds located throughout the course.

From the Rough

In case you missed last week's report, be sure to catch staff writer Doug Saunders' visit to Northern Nevada. Home to great golf as well as wonderful scenery on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada range, the city of Genoa rests at the base of the Sierra just 18 miles from Lake Tahoe. It’s also home to the Golf Club at Genoa Lakes, one of the best tests of golf in the entire state of Nevada. Opened in 1994, the course has embarked on an ambitious renovation program that will include a state of the art golf learning center. The goal is to upgrade the conditions to tournament quality on a daily basis, but our reviewer says the layout is already a great challenge. “Genoa Lakes is a golf course that tantalizes you enough that you will want to come play it again no matter what you shoot here,” Saunders writes.

As always, if you disagree with our reviewers on a certain course or just want to sound off about the latest from the PGA Tour, be sure to visit the TravelGolf.com forum, a series of message boards where visitors can write about everything from the Myrtle Beach golf scene to new equipment. There's also a free classifieds section where golfers can advertise that old set of clubs they've been meaning to sell for years. And if you haven't checked it out already, be sure to visit the new TravelGolf.com Pro Shop, a joint venture with The Golf Warehouse. With all of this at TravelGolf.com, there's no need to go anywhere else on the Web.