Delaware Golf Trail expanding its offerings
January 2, 2015
John Ray is pleased with the first year’s progress for the Delaware Golf Trail, and is looking forward to expanding the organization’s reach in the coming year.
Ray, a Milton resident, is a former teaching pro at Dover Air Force Base, with a long prior career in education. He is also an avid advocate for junior golf, and tied that issue to the Trail partnership.
The Delaware Golf Trail is a discount course access card program. On behalf of each member, the Golf Trail makes a donation each year to the First Tee Program, which supports both junior golf instruction and valuable life lessons for the children who join it.
“We have to do as much as we can to support junior golf, because that’s the only way the game will survive,” Ray said in a recent interview.
The $25 annual membership in the Trail entitles purchasers to discounted greens fees at participating courses. In the Cape Region, these include American Classic Golf Club in Midway, Baywood Greens in Millsboro, the Rehoboth Golf Park, the North and South courses of The Rookery, and Sussex Pines in Georgetown.
Several courses upstate also accept the card, and Ray is seeking additional course memberships for 2015. The discount offers savings of an average of 16% over the usual daily rates, so depending on how many and which course are played, the Trail card can “pay for itself” in no time.
For more information, go to delawaregolftrail.com.
New murder mystery returns to an LPGA angle
Roberta Isleib is a clinical psychologist who is all about killing–and I mean that in the nicest way.
That’s because Isleib has also been enjoying a run of success as a mystery novelist, when not tending to the mental woes and cares of her regular clientele.
We first “met” when Isleib began a five-novel mystery series starring Cassandra Burdette, a struggling young LPGA pro. I reviewed these books in this column when they first appeared, from 2002 through 2006.
In addition to her problems out on the course, Cassie Burdette has a way of running into dead bodies at inconvenient times–as if there is a convenient time for that to happen. For example, in “Buried Lie,” a member of Burdette’s amateur foursome shows up dead shortly after the Shop-Rite pro-am outside Atlantic City. In “Final Fore,” the last book in the series, a promising young pro dies during an event at Mount Holyoke College.
Isleib now spends much of her year in and around Key West, FL, where golf options are far more limited than when she lived in the Northeast.
On the other hand, the usually sunny southernmost part of the continental U.S. has a good reputation for food.
Using plenty of locale references throughout her new series, Isleib is now five books into a new mystery series, using the nom de plume Lucy Burdette as the narrator.
Lucy is no golfer, but she is a food writer, and keeps semi-busy doing restaurant reviews and features for a small Key West newspaper.
Naturally, dead people have a way of showing up in Lucy’s life–much like her cousin Cassandra, the LPGA pro, coincidentally.
In the newest mystery, Death With All the Trimmings, (Penguin; $7.99 SRP), Cassandra makes an appearance or two, and has a minor role in the central mystery of the untimely demise of a popular New York City chef, down to the Keys to see his ex-wife.
As with her first series, Iselib liberally doses her books with plenty of local Key West color, which should be very familiar to Cape Region snowbirds who trek there each winter.
There’s also plenty of family drama, business hi-jinks at the paper, and other distractions to finding out who’s behind the latest murder.
If Isleib’s not careful, she may make Key West as figuratively unsafe as tiny Cabot Cove, scene of Angela Lansbury’s “Murder She Wrote” TV series.
These are fun little mysteries, just like Isleib’s original Cassandra novels.
And there are recipes, too.