June is usually supposed to be pretty much the middle of the season. In COVID-times however, all this is turned upside down and June is the new April.

Well, what a year this has been. Working in home-office for over 3 months now, May has been the time, at least in Germany, when golf courses have been re-opened after the closure due to the Corona pandemic.

I made it to the range in May twice I guess and it was OK, but playing a round, the first round of the year, clearly is something much different.

Checking the courses nearby, I was astonished how crowded the tee times have been. On the weekend, when I have time to play, there wasn’t a single slot available from 6am to 6pm. Fully booked golf courses with 4 players in the group, what a nice thing to see.

Well, not so much if you’d be interested to get your name on the list on short notice yourself but overall great that golf is back in the game. Would be shame if not really: An outdoors, no-contact sport in beautiful weather. What could go wrong, huh?

Instead of the usual suspect courses around the corner, I chose a course a tad outside of the Rhein-Main region that normally doesn’t linger so many people just by the fact that it’s a bit remote. Not far off, but still a journey from downtown Frankfurt for instance.

I booked a tee time at Golfclub Taunus Weilrod, a 18-hole course in the hilly Taunus region with quite drastic elevation changes, tough to walk, but fair to play. It’s a bit quirky in terms of layout and routing but beautiful in a sense that you have nice vistas around the area when standing on an elevated tee box, for instance.

A vertical drop of 50 meters, just to give one example. But I was fired up, paid my 65 EUR and couldn’t wait for my solo round. Literally I couldn’t wait, as there was nobody there I just teed off 10 minutes before my tee time. There were just a few people out there.

The first tee shot requires a shot that should not go left towards the water. You bet my first tee shot of the year went left towards the water… luckily it cleared the pond, got a good bounce and ended on the fairway. The approach landed on the green and just hopped into the fringe. Not bad for a start.

Some great shots and some pretty mediocre shots happened in the following holes, and yes, some lousy ones too, but in general I played some very decent golf. A couple of pars, some bogeys and few doubles. So nothing to worry about if you’d ask me.

I played: No hat, no glove, no laser. Just a very enjoyable round of golf, no stress, no rush. On many holes I played two balls for the sake of training but still managed to finish my first nine in 70 minutes!

On 11 I got into traffic. Then, due to the quirkiness, the course routing allowed the elderly couple in front of me to take the 17 instead of the 12 and therefore short-cut the round which gave me some extra room before I ran into the next group on 14 only.

That was the time when I managed to get a glimpse of other players and saw them play, saw them struggle in maybe one of their first rounds of the year, too. Golf is definitely not a game of perfect.

The course is going up and down pretty hard. The fairways were pretty brown already and rock solid. It was a very enjoyable round of golf however, in beautiful sunshine, in a tranquil environment and I loved every moment of it, even the bad shots!

Apparently the old saying “a bad day of golf is always better than a good day in office” stands true for home-office, too. Who would have thought!

So in case you are after a quiet round without hassle, stress and jam packed tee time scheduled, Weilrod is your choice—around here that is.