The PGA Level 1 Seminar starts tomorrow at 8:30a, and I’m happy to report that I’ve arrived in Florida safe and sound. I left Tucson a little after 7:00 this morning, and the flight to Dallas was rather uneventful. It was the flight from Dallas to West Palm Beach when things really got interesting.
It’s never a good thing when your captain comes over the loudspeaker and says, “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We’re expecting a little weather on our way into the West Palm Beach area. We’re going to try and take the long way around in hopes we can dodge it, but we do have enough fuel to stay in the air for an extra couple of hours if we need to.” Oh boy.
I have to hand it to our pilot. He found just enough of a break in the weather and then made a beeline for it. We were the second to last plane allowed to land at West Palm Beach International Airport, but before we could pull into the gate, it started pouring.
There we were, in the middle of the tarmac, with nowhere to go because no one was working the ramp (or gate) at our terminal. How does an airport… in Florida… not have a contingency plan in the event there’s a summer afternoon rainstorm? Is this a new occurrence? I think not!
We waited on the tarmac for almost an hour for the rain to subside so we could taxi up to our gate and deplane. It wouldn’t have been that bad had it not been for the fact they had to turn the plane off and with it, the air conditioning. It’s not a lot of fun to be on a plane full of restless people just a few hundred feet away from your gate with no AC.
Once we got off the plane, the well-oiled machine took over. The PGA of America contracts all of its travel and transportation through Palm Beach Tours & Transportation, Inc., and you could tell they’d done this before. There was someone there to greet us at baggage claim and then there was a shuttle waiting to pick us up outside. For some, I’m sure it felt like an all-day event just waiting at the airport for everyone to arrive. There are people here from all across the country.
The shuttle ride from the airport to the Hilton Garden Inn in Port St. Lucie is only about 45 minutes down I-95. There are 48 people registered for the Seminar, but not everyone has arrived yet. If they’re still coming, they better get here by 8:00a tomorrow!
My clocks are all screwed up. Arizona is three hours behind Florida this time of year, but it was time to eat dinner. We were all going to head over to Duffy’s Sports Grill, but when we pulled it up on a map, it said it would take us nearly 30-minutes to cover the .9 of a mile on foot. That wasn’t happening.
Palm Beach Tours also offers a courtesy shuttle service from the hotel between 6:00p-9:00p every night just for PGA PGM attendees, but with all of us raring to go, the 15-person passenger van filled-up pretty quickly.
There are a lot of restaurant options less than five minutes away. There’s everything from Chipotle, Jimmy John’s, and Panda Express to Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, and Chili’s. You can either grab and go (and Marvin the charismatic driver will wait) or you can stay and eat. There’s no set route, you just tell Marvin where you want to go, and he’ll take you there. Your wish is his command! A couple of other guys and I decided to grab a quick meal at Sam Snead’s Oak Grill & Tavern located inside the hotel instead.
This is where we’ll be eating breakfast and lunch every day while we’re here. True to its name, the restaurant is full of Sam Snead golf memorabilia. The food wasn’t half bad either. I’ll probably be tired of it by the end of the week, but on this night, I highly recommend it.