I get it. Orlando is easy. Everybody can find a flight, the rental car lot is the size of Rhode Island, and there are more golf courses than you could play in a year. It is also where every other golf group in America is headed the same week you are, which is why you are paying tourist-corridor green fees, eating at a chain steakhouse with a 90-minute wait, and sharing the first tee with a bachelor party that has already lost a groomsman.
Here is a better plan. Land in Orlando like you always do, point the rental car south on US 27, and keep driving until the billboards for theme parks turn into billboards for citrus stands and cattle auctions. About an hour later you are in Sebring, home of the Citrus Golf Trail, and your trip just got cheaper, quieter and a whole lot more interesting.
Five reasons to make the drive.
1. The Package Is Not a Typo
Stay and Play at Inn on the Lakes starts at $109 per person per night, double occupancy. That includes your room, a round of golf for two with cart, hot breakfast for two at Chicanes, and all-day happy hour in the Chicanes Bar for your entire stay.
Read that last part again. All day. Entire stay. Somebody at that hotel sat in a meeting and said "what if happy hour just never ended" and nobody stopped him. That person deserves a statue.
Run the numbers against your usual Orlando trip. Four guys, three nights, three rounds. In the tourist corridor you are looking at a green fee alone that rivals the Sebring rate for the whole day, and that is before the hotel, the resort fee, the parking fee, the breakfast buffet that costs what a decent round should, and the drinks. In Sebring the number on the confirmation email is close to the number you will actually pay, which in Florida qualifies as a miracle.
Rates move with the season and there are some course restrictions, so book winter dates early. But the value does not budge.
2. Real Golf Without the Screened Pool Cages
The Trail is eight courses spread across Sebring, Avon Park and Lake Placid, all within easy reach of the Inn, and the thing you notice first is what is missing. Houses. So much Florida golf is a tour of other people's backyards. Out here the fairways run past orange groves, old pines and lakes you can actually see.
Sun 'N Lake Golf Club is the headliner, 36 holes north of town that gets voted the top golf spot in the county every year. Deer Run is the tough one, a Don Dyer layout from 1976 that Ron Garl reworked in 2003, with elevated greens that punish a miss on the wrong side and a finishing hole you will talk about on the drive home. More on that below. Turtle Run is the sneaky one, a 1999 Charles Ankrom design that barely tops 6,400 yards and does not care one bit how far you hit driver. Narrow landing areas, mounds, deep bunkers, slick greens. It is the prettier of the two and the one the locals drive 30 miles to play.
Highlands Ridge gives you another 36 holes up in Avon Park. River Greens and Placid Lakes cover the south end. Golf Hammock and Country Club of Sebring are close to the hotel, and Sebring Muni is where the regulars go. That is five or six days of golf without repeating a course, at prices that let you play 36 when the mood strikes.
3. You Can Play a Donald Ross Course for Less Than a Sleeve of Balls
Twenty minutes up the road in Avon Park sits Pinecrest Golf Club, and this is the one for your buddy who reads architecture books on the plane.
Donald Ross came to town in 1926 to oversee construction of the course, built as the amenity for a grand hotel on Lake Lotela that catered to rich Chicagoans fleeing the winter. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played here. So did Burns and Allen, FDR and Grover Cleveland. Local legend puts Al Capone on the property working on his tan and his short game, which would make him the only member of the Chicago outfit who understood a false front.
In the late 1950s Pinecrest hosted the World Championship of Golf, the first nationally televised PGA event, won by Cary Middlecoff. The hotel lost a long war with termites and came down in 2007, but the course survived, first under the city and then in the hands of the members. It is semi-private and open to guests year-round.
The golf is exactly what you hope for. Wide fairways, rolling ground, crowned greens with false fronts that send a timid approach rolling back to your feet, a couple of tee boxes that aim you somewhere you should not go, and not a single house on the property. Summer rates drop to around $20. I have paid more than that for a hot dog at a tournament.
4. The Island Green Settles All Bets
Every buddy trip needs a hole where the money changes hands, and Deer Run at Sun 'N Lake hands you one at the end of the round. The 18th is a par three to an island green, about 145 yards from the whites. That is a stock 8 iron for most of your group and a full-blown identity crisis for the guy who has been hitting it thin all day.
How many courses finish on a par three? Almost none. How many finish on a par three over water with the whole group standing behind you and the beer money on the line? This one. Get the closest-to-the-pin pot organized on the first tee, because by the time you reach 18 nobody will remember the terms and everybody will remember the splash.
Play Turtle Run first. Save Deer Run for when everybody has had a chance to get their swing sorted out, or at least talked themselves into believing they have.
5. There Is a Racetrack Down the Road
Sebring International Raceway is America's oldest road racing track, laid out on the runways of the old Hendricks Army Airfield, and the 12 Hours of Sebring is one of the great endurance races on the planet. In 2027 it
