Carmel, California

I have glimpsed Heaven on Earth and it is the Monterey Peninsula in California.

Golfers know Monterey as the home of Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, Poppy Hills and Cypress Point.

A little inland, up into Santa Lucia mountains and down into Carmel Valley, lies a Pete Dye design called Carmel Valley Ranch. More on that property tomorrow.

But let me tell you how my wife and I found ourselves in California to begin with.

Several weeks ago, I received an email from Hill and Knowlton, a large, international public relations company, inviting me and a guest to join other bloggers for a long weekend in Monterey, courtesy of Mazda North America.

We would be an assorted group that included travel, wine and food bloggers as well as golf bloggers - six in all.

Apart from yours truly, there were two other golf bloggers - Ed Lee from The Golf Blog and Tony Korologos who writes Hooked On Golf and The Golf Space.

Long story short, we jumped at the chance. All travel and accommodation arrangements were made by Mazda with the whole operation on the ground spearheaded by Melanie Froysaa, whose official title is "Specialist, Dealer and Corporate Communications".

And a specialist, she was. Not a single mistake made, not a single detail overlooked and first-class all the way. We came to realize that approach applied to all the Mazda PR people we met on our trip.

But air travel is air travel - you take what you get, these days.

Golfers love to travel whenever they can to play the game they love; long flights mean you should select your airline carefully. United Airlines would not be my first choice, however. Very competent flight deck crews, no doubt. But sardines in a tin are more comfortable than passengers in United economy. Even the first-class seats looked mighty narrow, considering the heavy hit to the wallet.

I can't remember the last time I flew and had to wait for the cabin crew to roll the in-flight movie. These days, all media is on-demand with touch screens in the backs of seats.

Not on this United flight.

What is normal with ALL airlines, save for a few, is that they don't feed you anymore. You bring food on board or buy it on board. Fair enough. Forewarned is forearmed. But five and a half hours with only sandwiches to purchase is no fun.

At any rate, we landed in San Francisco on time, made our connecting flight, a puddle jumper to Monterey, and were met by a friendly chauffeur who piled two sets of clubs, one suitcase and a large carry bag into a new Mazda CX-7.
Off we went.

If the flight was barely tolerable, our accommodations at Bernardus Lodge in Carmel Valley were the complete opposite. There aren't enough stars in the Michelin Guide ranking system to describe the digs that the Mazda folks put us into.

The place is amazing and that includes the food. The wine and food bloggers who were part of our group got pretty trippy.

We never met the chef but their sous-chef, Tim, was terrific with us. Twice he whipped up multi-course affairs, one of them outdoors in the Bernardus herb gardens.

I had never seen people actually taking close-up shots of the food on their plates before but it came to be the norm over the two and a half days we spent together.

Of course, Tony Korologos, Ed Lee and I were snap-happy on the golf course the next day, too!

And that's my jumping off point for now. Tomorrow, a detailed look at Carmel Valley Ranch, a Pete Dye design that has just emerged from a multi-million dollar face-lift.

It's spectacular but there are some rough spots.